


Rules of Engagement

by inthegrayworld



Series: Storm [3]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Anal Sex, Angst and Fluff and Smut, BDSM, Blood and Injury, Consensual, Dirty Talk, Drunken Shenanigans, Duelling, F/M, Ficlet, Fight Scene, Fingerfucking, Fucking, Gratuitous Smut, Hiding, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Oral Sex, Polyamory, Roleplay, Rumination, Secret Relationship, Shorts, Smut, The Dark Side of the Force, The Light Side of the Force, Threesome, War, butt stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-03-17
Packaged: 2018-09-17 22:06:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 46,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9348503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inthegrayworld/pseuds/inthegrayworld
Summary: Rey and Kylo Ren have decided to carry on their carrying-on. But conducting an affair when both parties are on either end of a war has its pitfalls - there has to be caution, and there have to be rules.Told in a series of short one-offs that all tie together.This is a sequel to 'In The Middle of the Blue Ocean', which was a sequel to 'Behind the Storm', neither of which you necessarily have to read to understand what’s happening here, just, if you want to see the slow collapse of Rey and Ren’s resistance to the idea that they should be fucken on a more regular basis.





	1. On names

**Author's Note:**

> So welcome to part 3, to finally close (what has become) the Storm Trilogy :D. We’re looking at way more chapters (but at a much smaller average word count). 
> 
> Currently planned for 16 chapters.
> 
> Sometimes smut happens, sometimes other things.
> 
> I’m gunna be very ambitious and say updates will be twice to thrice a week (what can possibly go wrong), cept for today, when you get chapters 1 and 2 at once :).
> 
> inthegrayworld.tumblr.com

**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
That is a terrible idea.  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
it really is o_o  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
I don’t need to tell you how bad the repercussions could be.  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
it’ll be awkward, for one  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
Would you fucking take this seriously. There have to be rules.  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
obviously.  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
No traces. Anything goes awry, we abort.  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
i have questions O__o  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
What are your questions.  
If you ask ‘what are you wearing’ again, I’m going back to the meditation chamber.  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
haha, i know the answer is ‘black’ n__n  
no, what I mean is when and where?

  
***  
  
CORUSCANT  
Galactic City  
Quadrennial Masquerade Night  
  
  
She was around here, somewhere. Kylo could feel her presence like one might feel the warmth of the sun through a pane of tinted glass. But the street was crowded with masks.  
  
She would be a humanoid figure behind one of those painted smiles or frowns or screams, under a visage of paper, wood, or plasteel.  
  
Beneath a veil of fine golden chain links, he forced himself to keep perfectly still, to ignore the notion that he wanted to throw up. The last time he’d felt that was when the Knights were being deployed to Jedha, facing one in ten odds of surviving the mission. This, he told himself, was a small matter in comparison. He was just. Waiting. For the girl.  
  
Even if it had been a full ten minutes since the rendezvous time, and he was not entirely rid of the notion that the eyes and ears of the Resistance—or worse, the First Order—were on him somehow. He was risking a lifetime, most certainly truncated, of disgrace and punishment and in exchange for what?  
  
_The satisfaction of an urge_ , he thought grimly.  
  
Even in his mind it seemed ridiculous. Unforgivable. Even if the urge had followed his footsteps from the moment he’d left the island shrine. A few days ago, he had almost broken the Monk’s arm for suggesting he looked like he’d been losing sleep.  
  
There was justification for this treason, he told himself, as he had told himself going down the ramp of the command shuttle, disappearing down one of Coruscant’s many narrow alleys, and trading one mask for another, a set of white robes for the black. Once he had worked this urge away, he would be able to operate normally again. She would no longer invade the privacy of his meditations. He would be able to return to his work without mentally composing and re-composing messages to the communicator he’d given her the last time they’d met.  
  
_If she’d just show up._  
  
A definitely feminine figure floated past his gaze - long, blue dress, shawl like silver water. She turned a crescent moon-shaped mask towards him—and then continued walking. No, it wasn’t her. Behind was another figure, possibly female, head to toe in a gray hooded cape. Was that…? But the figure had broken away to join an entire party of gray hooded capes.  
  
Watching them, he completely failed to notice the figure who had suddenly appeared to his left, until it made a polite coughing noise.  
  
As far as he could tell it was a Tusken Raider, in squat burlap robes, head wrapped in bandages except for the pitch-black goggles and protruding mouth piece. A sight parents would usher their children away from.  
  
“I like this,” a muffled voice said. It gestured towards the chainmail curtaining his face and the confusion on it. “Better than your other mask.”  
  
“…Bastila?” he asked.  
  
The Tusken Raider chortled. “Are we really using that?”  
  
It was her. He lowered his voice sharply.  
  
“Names,” he said. It was the first rule. They did not use each other’s names.  
  
“Fine,” she said. “Yes, Revan, it’s me.” She managed to keep most of the sarcasm out of the statement.  
  
“And where have you been?” he whispered, fighting the urge to look over his shoulder. They would meet at the time and place specified - that was the second rule, to which was attached the third rule of ‘go to discreet location, fuck, leave by oh-six-hundred next day to report to respective bases without attracting attention’. Simplicity itself.  
  
“Oh, I’ve been here for an hour,” she said. “But they were giving out free canapés up the street, and I sort of lost track of time.”  
  
His mouth went into a rigid line.  
  
“Look, sorry about that,” she said. “I’m just a little nervous right now. This is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.”  
  
“You and me both,” he said, but he offered her his hand, and she took it, and they were walking down the avenue as one of any number of costumed couples that night.  
  
“I’ve gotten us a transport,” he said. “It will take us to a hotel in the upper level. I’ve been assured of their complete discretion.”  
  
“Discretion is pricey,” she said.  
  
It was.  
  
“I have a stipend,” he said. “I’d just never used it until now.”  
  
Fortunately, the one in charge of processing the Knights of Ren’s stipends was Lieutenant Dopheld Mitaka.  
  
“ _Problem?_ ” Kylo had asked, as Mitaka had glanced at the finance request.  
  
“ _Not at all, sir—_ ” Mitaka had a standing arrangement with the infirmary involving the aftermath of his meetings with Kylo Ren. “ _Just checking you through—enjoy your shore leave, sir!_ ”  
  
He had not Force choked him.  
  
  
The transport was a nondescript cab. No identification plate, tinted windows, the driver behind a darkened pane.  
  
Seated beside him, he could begin to make her out, even underneath the face wrappings and the brown sack coat. He recognized the way she sat, legs apart, elbows on her thighs, face turned slightly towards the window so she could watch the lights of the megapolis zipping by.  
  
“What?” she asked. She hadn’t even needed to look at him.  
  
He was aware of heat rising up in his chest, a different kind of trepidation from the one that accompanied thoughts of getting caught.  
  
“I have wanted you for days,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Weeks. And you were _off getting canapés_?”  
  
She laughed. “I know as well as you do how this night is going to end. You just need to learn patience.”  
  
“You intend on making me wait even more?”  
  
She leaned back. Somewhere beneath all that swaddling was a grin that could cut him in half.  
  
“Just until you’re filled to the brim with anticipation,” she said. “Until you say ‘kriff Rey, let me fuck you, please.”  
  
Her name seemed to hang in the air between them, like something that should have been captured in a bottle and stowed away. He took a deep breath.  
  
“Kriff, Rey,” he said monotonously. “Let me fuck you. Please.”  
  
She reached up and began unwinding the bandages around her head.  
  
“Whatever you want,” she said, slowly revealing a mouth, still caught in that grin.  
  
“However you want,” she added, as her nose appeared, dappled with freckles.  
  
Corscant’s lights gleamed in the pits of her eyes, a stray hair coiled on her brow. “As many times as you want.”  
  
He lunged at her so hard the entire cab shook, thud loud over the whine of the engine. She was biting her lip, trying not to laugh, ripping off his veil which fell to the floor in a tinkle of fine chains, the air suddenly cold on his face as he swept her knees up onto the seat, pushing her back, her head slipping down the edge of the window, the leather beneath them creaking.  
  
Distant thoughts nipped at his mind, something about the possibility of getting caught in an awkward position, threat of exposure, witnesses, a thousand different clamours, all of which jumped right off a cliff the moment he got his hands beneath that rough brown sack, finding familiar lines and planes and swells. Things he’d missed. Her skin was frustratingly still encased in rolls of fabric, but she was warm, warmer still when he’d found the line of her pants, he just had to get his hand through—  
  
She said nothing, but her breath came tight between her teeth, eyelids fluttering. She was gloriously wet under his fingers.  
  
She opened her mouth, as though to say something, but he plunged a finger right where she was tightest, and whatever she meant to say disappeared. He could see the effort it was taking her to control her breathing. They could not afford to be loud. To be heard. He immediately went to testing her resilience, moving the finger in and out.  
  
Between exhalations, he found her watching his face intently. Something else was poised on her lips. A name.  
  
‘ _What am I supposed to call you when we’re fucking?_ ’ she had asked, the latest in a lengthening column of messages appearing on his datapad.  
  
‘ _You know what not to call me,_ ’ he had responded, even if he remembered very well what _that_ name had sounded in her voice, mentioned in conversation, whispered, repeated tremulously, yelled aloud. Even now, thinking of it was without the unpleasantness that usually arose from remembering that name. But—no. Not out here. There were lines that could not be crossed. That’s why there were rules.  
  
She allowed her eyes to shut. “Ren,” she whispered.  
  
Ren. It would do.  
  
He rewarded her by pressing his thumb in circles against the button of her clit. She tensed up at that, one leg kicking out from under his arm, toes knocking against the opposite window.  
  
“Wait—“ she looked up at his face. “I can’t come here—not right now—“  
  
He slipped his other hand behind her head, bringing her face closer to his. “Whatever I wanted. That’s what you said.”  
  
Past the band of her pants, he twisted his wrist in a way that made her clench her teeth.  
  
“I did say that,” she murmured.  
  
He slowed the pace, slipping a second finger in, feeling warm moisture all along the palm of his hand.  
  
The cab’s intercom suddenly buzzed to life.  
  
“Boss, we’re here,” came the driver’s deep, throaty voice. Both Kylo and Rey looked up at the tinted windows. The cab had indeed come to a halt at the hotel’s driveway.  
  
Kylo was not in the mood to place his hands elsewhere, so it was Rey who reached outward, lazily trying to find the buzzer button on their side of the cab from her position on the seat. It took a few tries to find it.  
  
The light above the mic switched on.  
  
“Go around the block again,” Kylo said, his voice steady, even as his fingers continued to move.  
  
“Boss?”  
  
There was a particular tone of voice Kylo used when he was giving an order aboard the Finalizer. He used it now, while simultaneously switching one finger for another.  
  
“Go around the block. Again.”  
  
From beneath him, Rey’s voice was barely audible. “Twice.”  
  
“Twice,” he said, to the glowing red light above the speaker box.  
  
There was a pause from the other end.  
  
“It’s your credits, bub.”  
  
The cab began to move again, back into the Coruscant night.  
  
Rey came a minute later, burying her face in his shoulder, what little noise that escaped lost under the hum of the engine.  
  
He finally moved away, straightening up back in his seat. But then she was sliding down to the floor in front of him, trying to find an opening in his robes.  
  
“How long does it actually take us to go around the block?” she asked, finding his belt, unlatching it.  
  
He leaned back on the head rest. Hadn’t there been a plan they were supposed to be following? For the moment, he couldn’t remember.  
  
“No idea,” he muttered, digging his fingers into the leather of the seat.


	2. On backstory

PAMARTHE  
Pamarthe Spaceport  
  
  
The Brayl-class cargo hauler sat on the tarmac like a luggabeast crouched in waiting. That was the ship they were meant to use to get off-world - the written accord with the pilot was still scrunched up in Rey’s pocket, listing her as a swabber from Tatooine, and her male companion as a soldier from Wykanthu. They needed backstories in case anyone asked. It was one of the rules.  
  
She watched from the spaceport’s viewing deck as a detachment of stormtroopers went up the freighter’s gangplank, the harassed-looking pilot following behind.   
  
“Nobody leaves the spaceport without an authorization from the First Order,” Kylo said, coming up behind her, hood pulled firmly down his face. She could see the tension in his chin. “Apparently, there was some sort of Resistance incursion yesterday.”  
  
He didn’t ask if she was involved, and she didn’t offer any details, but there was an edge to his tone as he said, “I wondered why you were so insistent in meeting here.”  
  
Because coming from a hot shower after an evening of dodging blaster fire, feeling just a hint of his presence in the Force, and going back out into the unassuming little rented flat to find him already sitting in bed, stripped to the waist, had been _absolutely worth it_.  
  
Rey shrugged. “Mustafar would have been a bit too far off for me.”  
  
“Better than this dust bowl,” he said. “This was not a planet I wanted to return to.”  
  
“And yet you agreed.”  
  
“When someone says ‘if we meet here, I’ll eat your ass,’ you take it,” he said.  
  
Behind the shawl that wrapped around Rey’s face, she smiled.  
  
The smile immediately disappeared as a squad of stormtroopers marched past. Kylo lowered his head, and Rey leaned back against the banister, trying not to look suspicious. She held her breath until the squad had gone past.  
  
“So what now?” Kylo asked.  
  
“I’m not sure,” Rey said. “We’ll have to smuggle ourselves out.”  
  
He looked away. “Yes, that is the only way now, isn’t it?”  
  
She caught a glimpse of his eyes, a strange look had come upon them.  
  
Not for the first time, Rey considered how looking at him was like seeing the tip of an old Imperial comms array jutting out of a dune. It was a mighty impressive spike, but any scavenger worth their salt knew that majority of its body, and thus the best loot, was buried deep in the sand.  
  
Although, unearthing the entirety of Jakku would probably have been easier than explaining what she was doing now, walking alongside him down the deck where stranded passengers had begun to cluster. What _they_ were doing.  
  
There was the sex, yes. But there was also something else, a constant niggling that had begun as an idle curiosity after the destruction of Starkiller Base, about the face that had appeared from underneath the mask, that had seen her too deeply.   
  
She had wondered what it would be like to touch it, to learn why seeing that face had reminded her of long, cold nights on Jakku. Maybe when she’d finally dug that up, she would finally be rid of the need to see him like this. No more lying to her friends, and concocting made-up backstories of various believability. At least she could hope for that.  
  
  
“Here,” he suddenly said, turning sharply into what Rey had thought was just a gap between the pillars. It was actually a corridor, so narrow he had to walk ahead, with her right behind. The corridor took a left, past a hanging piece of tarp, and into a large windowless room dotted with merchant’s booths and tables, but Rey was familiar with this ruckus - with the dodgy glances, and the covert exchange of merchandise. It even smelled like a black market.  
  
She turned to Kylo.   
  
“How did you know about this place—“ but she stopped short. At first she thought an insect might have bitten him in the face, that’s why his mouth was stretched out like that, teeth bared.   
  
And then she realized he was approximating a friendly smile.  
  
“Take my arm,” he said.  
  
“Uh—what?”  
  
“My arm. Take it.”  
  
He ignored her look of mounting bewilderment and prodded her with his elbow until she took his arm.   
  
“I’ll do the talking,” he said, face still disconcertingly frozen in place. He led her to a specific desk littered with what Rey recognized as parts culled from a dozen different kinds of speeder engines. Behind the counter was a shriveled old human woman, practically bald, her tiny eyes almost lost under the folds of her brow.  
  
Kylo walked right up to the counter.   
  
“Auntie Kaya,” he said, in a voice that rang so wildly different from what Rey was used to hearing, she wasn’t quite sure how to react. So she plastered a smile on as well.  
  
The old woman looked up, eyes watery. She snatched a pince-nez from under the desk and fitted it to her nose.  
  
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked, looking right at Kylo.  
  
 _My question exactly_ , Rey thought.  
  
Kylo leaned in towards the old woman, pushing back his hood. “Auntie… it’s me.”  
  
The old woman squinted at him, but recognition dawned quickly.  
  
“Ben? Little Ben?” She took his face in a pair of wrinkled hands. “Mistook my blaster for a lighter Ben? Peed in the bucket because he couldn’t hold it in anymore Ben?”  
  
Her voice grew solemn. “Ben ‘listen to me Auntie I can talk Wookie now!’ Solo?”  
  
Rey chortled, tried to keep it down, created a noise like she was both sneezing and coughing on her own spit.  
  
“It’s good to see you,” Kylo said, looking for all the world to be perfectly happy to be here.   
  
The old woman gave his cheek a pinch. “Look how tall you’ve gotten! You were just up to my shoulder the last time the Falcon dropped by!”  
  
“That was a long, long time ago,” he responded, his tone just a bit tighter but the old woman didn’t seem to notice.   
  
“And who is this?” Auntie Kaya asked, turning to Rey.  
  
Kylo put his hand around her waist. “This is my wife, Rey.”  
  
Auntie Kaya gave a high-pitched, yelping laugh, that covered the snort that Rey did not bother to suppress.  
  
“How wonderful, Ben,” Auntie Kaya reached out and Rey hesitantly took those wizened hands in hers.   
  
“I like the look of you,” the old woman said. “You’re a fighter, I can tell. How’d you end up saddled with this ugly son of a bitch?”  
  
Rey’s eyes shot towards Kylo, but he responded as though this were a story he’d told a thousand times.   
  
“I was missing a droid,” he said. “She found it.”  
  
Auntie Kaya snickered, but past the lenses, those beady eyes were now focused on Rey’s fingers. “Where’s your wedding band, dear?”  
  
“Hawked it,” Kylo said immediately, before Rey could sputter something out. “We needed tickets off this shithole but the First Order clamped down on all departing ships.”  
  
The old woman tsk’d, shaking her head. “Those infected cunts.”  
  
“That’s why we came to see you,” Kylo said, adopting a weird, cajoling manner that burned itself into Rey’s mind, that it occurred to her may very well throw her off the next time they had to duel. “Think you can help us, Auntie?”  
  
The old woman narrowed her eyes at him, the tips of her lips curling upwards. “I knew it. Just came by to ask a favor, didn’t you? You’re a cheeky dick waffle, just like your father.”  
  
The words had barely left her lips when her expression suddenly softened.   
  
“We heard what happened,” she said, voice dropping to a whisper. “I’m so sorry about Han. He was a bastard’s bastard, but he was a fighter too. It must have been hell for you and your mom.”  
  
The subtle motions of his face would have meant nothing to anyone else. To Rey, it was like observing sand shifting under the wind. What was buried came briefly to light - anger, barely restrained, pooling into something that looked like shame, before eddying into a look she had only seen once before - the exact look on his face standing on a precipice, ignited lightsaber in hand, alone where he and his father had stood together a moment before.   
  
A cold knife twisted in Rey’s guts, remembering the pang of watching Han Solo fall. In the snowy woods of Starkiller base, she had demonstrated to Kylo Ren the sharp edge of her grief. And yet, here now, she stood beside him, pinned by a niggling she couldn’t place.  
  
It would have been the perfect moment in their play-acting for her to take his hand, make a show of comforting him, like a good wife should. But Rey did not. The moment rang a bit too harshly, and while he heaved, trying to keep to the backstory, Rey turned to Auntie Kaya with a supplicating look.  
  
“We’re really hoping you can help us, Auntie,” she said. “We need to get back to the little ones.”  
  
The old woman’s eyes went wide, as did Kylo’s, and like a burst of lightning through the Force his thoughts landed in her mind. _Fucking what?_  
  
“Little—? Ben,” Auntie Kaya gave him a bemused look. “And how many little Bens are there?”  
  
He opened his mouth. Shut it. Turned back to Rey.  
  
“Four,” Rey said, as sweetly as she could manage. “BB, Finn, Poe, and baby Armitage.”  
  
She did not have to look towards Kylo, she could almost hear the vein throbbing in his temple.  
  
“We have to get back to them as soon as we can,” Rey said. “They get antsy if we’re gone for too long.”  
  
She turned to Kylo, gave him as matronly a look as she could manage.   
  
“Isn’t that right, darling?”  
  
New lines had appeared on the edge of his jaw.   
  
“Right, sweetheart,” he said through his teeth.  
  
“Oh, you two,” Auntie Kaya gave them a wistful look. “You just fatten this wrinkly old heart of mine.”   
  
She made a gesture for them to lean in.  
  
“There’s a BFF-1 sitting in landing pad A-45 with authorized priority passage to Beta Station. Pilot’s a guy named Gawr. You tell him that if he gets you lovebirds off world, Auntie Kaya will loosen the vice on his balls.”  
  
“Thank you, Auntie,” Kylo said, though Rey couldn’t tell if his relief was for show or genuine.  
  
“Damn right,” she said, her shrouded eyes turning from him, to Rey. “You two look like you get into a lot of trouble. Take care of each other.”  
  
  
Gawr kept them both in the hidden smuggler’s compartment at the back of the freighter, where they sat among crates of spice and unstamped speeder components.  
  
Kylo had settled with his back to a crate, that gaze of his fixed on the wall, the stillness not quite hiding the rapid fire of thoughts underneath. It wasn’t until the roar of the engines had faded into a hum, signalling they’d broken out of the atmosphere, that he spoke.  
  
“Four? Really?”  
  
Rey shrugged. “Why, how many did you want?”  
  
A new look came upon his face, something that made him turn quickly away, that made Rey snicker.   
  
Just when she thought she was getting to the bones of him, something new asserted itself. She leaned her head on the base of her palm, watching. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 10 points to whoever knows where "cheeky dick waffle" came from :D.
> 
> Next chapter should be up by Wednesday.


	3. On evidence

FINALIZER  
First Order Resurgent-class Battlecruiser  
Kylo Ren’s chamber  
  
  
It would be another hour until he was needed to brief the Knights on their next mission. He had instructed to be left alone during this time, ostensibly to meditate, and awe had bubbled up from his officers’ minds. Kylo Ren, just back from one mission, would meditate until jumping right into the next one.  
  
He had been on a mission, that was true. The logs had him on a five day-long subjugation drive against the Ti Clan in Shili. He had finished it in three. The last two days had been for disappearing into one of the cheap traveler’s motels in the capital city of Corvala, where it was easy to get lost in the crowds.  
  
Kylo sat back on his pallet, legs up on the mattress, still in his boots. Still in his mask. Sitting in his hand was a small disposable holocam, purchased from a run-down tourist shop a block away from the motel.  
  
He ran his thumb over a button on the holocam’s face and a small image appeared on the projection plate. It was a low-resolution hologram, all color drained into standard holo blue, and the details grainy at the edges. But it was clearly a room, the bed on one side, a quarterstaff leaned against the corner of the wall. Off to the left was an open door leading out onto a small balcony, where Rey stood with her back to the holocam, surveying the urban sprawl of Corvala.  
  
Kylo paused and looked up, at the helmet of Darth Vader sitting on its plinth across him. Without making a noise, he edged himself to the side, until the helmet was out of his line of sight.  
  
He pressed the button again. Now the holocam was right behind Rey, and she’d looked over her shoulder.  
  
“ _What’s that?_ ” she had asked.  
  
He had told her what he intended to use it for.  
  
The next image was of her reaction, a deep-lined grin, one hand up to her face in just the slightest trace of embarrassment, eyes glinting.  
  
“ _You fucking perv,_ ” she had said.  
  
He pressed the button again and now she was at the bed, an opened box beside her. She was looking at what seemed to be pieces of gauze.  
  
“ _Where did you even get these?_ ” she had asked, her voice still clear in his mind, the mixture of amusement and disbelief.  
  
“ _Down the street,_ ” he had said. “ _Pretty sure I got your size right._ ”  
  
She’d held up the pieces. The holocam tinged it in the same bland blue, but in reality it had been jet black.  
  
The top was a piece that was meant to hug her breasts and hang loose around the torso. It was almost entirely transparent, coiling embroidery teasing around the lines of the bodice. The bottom was a few strips of cloth of the same see-through material, garnished along the edges with lace.  
  
“ _I’ve never worn anything like this before,_ ” she had said. “ _Look at this fabric—I could hang this around my bed and catch flies—_ “  
  
She had looked up at him and gestured at the balcony door. “ _Close that, would you?_ ”  
  
He had gone to do that, but had turned back to find that she had started pulling off her shirt.  
  
“ _Wait—_ “ he had fumbled at the holocam. There was a stilted image of her shirt halfway off her shoulders. “ _I didn’t mean we had to do this now—_ “  
  
Followed by an image of her bare back to him, her pantaloons inching downward.  
  
“ _Why not?_ ” she had asked.  
  
He’d made some kind of muttered reference to having dinner first, and he’d expected to give a protracted explanation of how he would destroy the images afterwards—they could leave no evidence after all, one of the rules—but coherent thought had very quickly fled his mind, and his fingers were suddenly clumsy around the holocam.  
  
There was a rapid succession of shots, of her pantaloons leaving her feet, holding up the gauze top against her torso, looking up at him briefly and laughing at what must have been the look on his face.  
  
The bottoms had hugged her low at the hips, the floss lost between the cheeks of her ass. He had one particularly good shot of that, as she had been struggling to get the top down her shoulders.  
  
Sitting on his pallet, Kylo felt the same urgent rush he had felt in the room in Corvala. He yanked the glove off one hand, not even bothering with his mask, just fishing his dick out of his pants. He could feel the deep throb against the callouses on his palm, squeezed, eyes drifting shut for a moment.  
  
The next image was of Rey trying to get the top to behave on her chest, yanking at the straps, pulling the cups down on her breasts with a look of doubt on her face.  
  
“ _Is this even meant to cover my nipples—guess not…_ ”  
  
And then she was standing at the mirror, feet astride, hands on her hips. The top was a bit too tight, squeezing her breasts together, her nipples dark against the fabric. Her pubic hair stuck out of the thong. She was chuckling into the mirror.  
  
“ _Well, it’s okay,_ ” she had said with a shrug. “ _What do you think…?_ ”  
  
He had taken about five shots of her in a row, as she turned from side to side in front of the mirror, seeing how she looked like from behind.  
  
“ _It’s perfect,_ ” he had said—he remembered the words so clearly he muttered them now, so softly his voice modulator barely caught it, as he started tugging on his dick. “ _You look perfect._ ”  
  
His grip tightened, rubbing more vigorously with one hand as his other summoned up the next image. It was of the side of her face, eyes half-closed in concentration, her tongue making lines on the head of his dick.  
  
Kylo moaned softly, remembering how she had sucked his dick with the proficiency of someone with much practice with it, knowing the length and girth of it, and the strain she could create with a smack of her tongue, the tautening of her lips.  
  
Now, the holocam was behind her, and she was on the bed, ass lifted up, the fact that he had been buried in her lost to the lower frame of the image. He could see a sliver of her face, mouth open, frozen with the sound at the back of her throat.  
  
And then she was on her back, beneath the holocam’s eye. There was a blur of movement—this was when he’d gripped the fabric at her chest and pulled, and it had hardly made a ripping noise at all.  
  
“ _What the hell—?_ ” she had looked up at him with amusement. “ _You were just going to rip it off?_ ”  
  
“ _Yes,_ ” he had grunted. “ _While doing this—_ “  
  
Fucking her faster, pummelling into her, catching the heave of her breasts and the grit of her teeth in a blurry shot.  
  
He didn’t catch it when she came, he was too busy coming himself. In his room on the Finalizer, he looked down at his hand, dazed, at the white trickling through the gaps of his fingers. He’d have to clean that up.  
  
He leaned back on his elbows, lazily perusing the next images.  
  
There she was after she had peaked, breathing through her lips, idly fingering the torn gauze hanging off her shoulders.  
  
“ _Come here,_ ” she had suddenly said, and there was a strangely-angled image of her ribs, where he had accidentally clicked on the holocam when she made him lean his head towards her.  
  
“ _What are you doing?_ ” he had asked, over the sound of fabric rustling.  
  
“ _Don’t move,_ ” she had said.  
  
“ _What are you—really?_ ”  
  
And then she had taken the holocam.  
  
He winced at the image. It was him, eyes turned to the side, shadows deep on the side of his scarred face and bare shoulders, scraps of the gauze from her top ripped to strips and tied in a ribbon around his neck, the bow sitting right on his collar bone.  
  
“ _I like it,_ ” she had said, from behind the holocam. “ _Look at me._ ”  
  
The next shot was identical to the previous one except his eyes looked straight. He didn’t dwell on it for too long, there was something disconcerting in his eyes. His lips were poised with her name on them.  
  
The image after showed her hand coming in from out of frame, a finger hooking around the makeshift collar. She had tugged him towards her, put down the camera, and made to kiss him in the mouth. But instead, she had bitten him, snapping sharply on his lower lip. Beneath the mask, he instinctively tongued the cut her teeth had made.  
  
That had been enough to bring the blood rushing back into his dick. He would have fucked her again, but a noise had disturbed them, a loud, high beeping.  
  
He had an image, accidentally taken once again, of her jumping off the bed and rushing towards her pack, following the beeping to her portable communicator.  
  
She had taken the call in the bathroom, and though he couldn’t hear specifics, there was no mistaking the gravity that entered her tone. He had remained in bed, absently running a finger through the ribbon around his neck.  
  
“ _What was that?_ ” he had asked when she emerged again, before remembering it was better not to ask.  
  
“ _They’re asking me to clean up your mess with the Ti Clan,_ ” she had said, before remembering it was best not to reply.  
  
She had hopped back into bed—“ _it can wait til morning_ ”—and there had been a bit more by way of kissing and groping, but the fire had largely gone.  
  
Her side of the bed had cooled by the time he woke up the following morning, and her pack and staff were gone. He hadn’t been surprised, and downstairs, he was informed that his lady companion had already paid the bill.  
  
Back in his chambers, he wondered if she had succeeded in her mission, catching by its tail the stray thought that he hoped she had. She would have liked to succeed. But then he remembered whose work she would be undoing, and a deep churn welled up in his body.  
  
He wanted to lay back in his pallet, as still as a corpse, as he had done at the end of weeks of training with Snoke, or particularly taxing missions. But there was one last thing he had to do.  
  
He cleaned himself up, washing away all trace of his exertions. Then with the Force, he lifted up the holocam, drifting it across the room, and ignited his lightsaber. He had meant to destroy the device before he’d left Shili, but he’d kept putting it off. Now was his last chance to do it - leaving it here, even in his chambers, put them at risk of being discovered.  
  
But as he watched the holocam floating before him, he noticed on the little indicator on its side that there were two more images in its memory. This confused him - the last photo he had taken had been of her leaving the bed.  
  
Without actually touching the holocam, he found the view button with his mind and activated it.  
  
The image that appeared, hovering in mid-air, was once again of himself. He was in bed, blanket crumpled at his waist, his face peering through a rush of hair. He was fast asleep, still with that ridiculous black ribbon around his neck, but there was a hand from out the corner of the frame, fingers delicate on the bow under his chin.  
  
The churning within him grew sharp, as he remembered with blinding clarity the tickle of gauze on his throat. He made a gesture and the last image appeared. The ribbon was gone from his neck. Right beside his sleeping form was Rey, arm up as she took the shot with one hand, smiling at the holocam widely. In her other hand, she held the ribbon, now no more than a strip of gauze that could have been mistaken for a scrap of binding, or of a net used to keep out flies.  
  
I’m keeping it, her look said.  
  
Kylo’s grip on his lightsaber tightened, the crackle of it loud in the chamber.  
  
He had to steady himself. Sentiment had been Vader’s weakness - it could not be his as well. Even if he could make out the freckles on her nose, the stray hair across her forehead, through the blurry holo blue.  
  
He lashed out with the saber, the image vanishing under a red arc and the bubble and pop of plasteel turning to superheated mush. He didn’t stop, sweeping back and forth at the levitating remains.  
  
The blackened pieces fell out of the air, landing on the tray he kept on his desk, burning until they were indistinguishable from the ashes therein.  
  
Kylo glared at the tray, watching his memories of her mix with the memories of all those who burned to fill the tray, keeping himself from putting a name to the knot in his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So at the time I'm posting this, I've just finished drafting Chapter 8. It's been an interesting experience for me thus far, because every chapter is like an entirely new fic, and they tend to differ wildly in tone and Stuff That Happens. Hopefully it'll all still come together in a cohesive manner (:D). The characters are going down a certain path, and they're already behaving differently than I thought they would.
> 
> Next chapter should be up by Saturday.
> 
> Here's a preview:
> 
> [MU9431-YJL]  
> so what’s in scarif?
> 
> [BP5735-ZFG]  
> Oceans.
> 
> [MU9431-YJL]  
> O____O oohhhhh i love oceans.
> 
> [BP5735-ZFG]  
> I know.


	4. On arguments

**[MU9431-YJL]**  
so what’s in scarif?  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
Oceans.  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
O____O oohhhhh yes i love oceans.  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
I know.  
  
   
  
***  
  
SCARIF  
Havra VacationFuntown and Oceanside Villas  
12.3 clicks from Death Star devastation zone  
  
  
Among the rules was that they did not discuss politics. May as well debate on the nature of the Dark and Light side of the Force. But Rey had found a tour book in their discount oceanside villa—“there used to be an old Imperial base not far from here,” she had said—and he had looked up, “yes, the Citadel Tower security complex. The Death Star wiped it out after it was infested with rebel scum,”—and it had all gone downhill from there.  
  
Rey wasn’t sure why, three hours later, she was still arguing with him. She had learned, from experience with the hawkers of Jakku and a few choice prats in the Resistance, that when an argument looked like it was going nowhere it was best to just shut up and move on, while privately considering how the other side was either deluded or stupid. He was proving to be the exception.  
  
He had settled into the groove, “The Empire created peace and order—”, and her hackles had risen, “I don’t think cowing people into agreeing with your messed up philosophy counts as peace—“, and tirades had given way to anecdotes, had birthed vaguely-spun logic exercises, as they made their way down the seaside bazaar, Kylo hidden in the folds of his cowl, Rey under a face mask and large reflective glasses.  
  
“—the First Order are trying to accomplish the same thing,” he was saying, conviction as strong as his irritation, plodding after Rey as she picked her way through a stall of island fruits.  
  
“Yeah,” she said, poking uncertainly at a flaccid-looking meiloorun. “By blasting and burning their way through the galaxy.”  
  
“Brutality is a tool—even the Jedi knew that, that’s why they had lightsabers,” he pushed away the meiloorun she was looking at and replaced it with a far healthier-looking specimen. “The strong herd the weak. And most of the sentients in this galaxy are weak. Which is why people like—”  
  
“Like you?” Rey asked, as she dropped a few credits on the counter and stashed the fruit away.  
  
“I was going to say, ‘like me and you.’”  
  
She smirked. “I’m not interested in herding anyone.”  
  
“But you have power,” he said. “That gives you responsibility, whether you like it or not.”  
  
She paused. That at least, made sense.  
  
“Even if you had all the power in the galaxy, you wouldn’t be able to control everyone,” she said, with a shrug. “You’d just piss people off.”  
  
“Which is why you find those people and tear them down—” A strange note tinged his tone, something that wasn’t quite regret, but shared a home with it. “It’s not something I gain enjoyment from. It’s just necessary. You have to take their dreams, their hopes, and show them the futility of it.”  
  
“You could try,” Rey said, pulling down the glasses by just a bit, so she could look him right in the eye. There was a challenge in her look. “Hope is a hard thing to kill.”  
  
The words had barely left her mouth when something—like the strike of a spoon against a glass ringing through the Force—caught their attention.  
  
It came distinctly from a table a few stalls down.  
  
Rey knew scavenged goods when she saw them - there were bits of old machinery, old tins and pots, rusted coinage that looked like they’d been panned from the sea. And in the corner, among a handful of discolored beads and wishing stones, was a crystal.  
  
Kylo picked it up. It was a small translucent chunk hanging off the end of a thin chain. A necklace. But the crystal itself gnawed at Rey’s mind, hinting at light, and power.  
  
She heard Kylo’s slowly-drawn breath.  
  
“Kyber,” he muttered.  
  
It cost 25 credits.  
  
He had found it first, therefore, he reasoned, it belonged to him. He wound the chain around his wrist, the kyber crystal bouncing against the ball of his hand. Besides, it was probably made by some worker in the old Death Star construction yard, an Imperial installation, meaning it was rightfully his.  
  
“Like Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber was rightfully yours?” Rey had asked, prickled, and that had triggered a second round of bickering that lasted all the way back back up the bazaar, and to the villa.  
  
  
“—Skywalker was an exemplary Jedi, but he only reached his true potential as Darth Vader,” Kylo said, sitting on the edge of the bed while Rey sliced open the meiloorun. She grimaced. Now he’d started on Vader, it was never going to end.  
  
“He accomplished much—but in the end he gave in to sentiment. Which is why it’s up to me,” Kylo leaned back on his elbows. She didn’t have to look up to know that his gaze was centered on her.  
  
“I am the one who must carry his burden,” he said, with the practiced cadence of someone who had said the same thing over and over before, although she wasn’t sure to whom he would have said it. To the others in the First Order? To everyone he’d cut down? To himself?  
  
“I don’t expect you to understand,” he said.  
  
Rey walked up with a small plate of meiloorun slices in one hand, and the little fruit knife in the other. She’d already lost her pants.  
  
“You’re right, I don’t.” She settled herself on his lap, and his hands wound around her hips. She felt the jagged edge of the kyber tickle her thigh.  
  
“You want to take the fate of the galaxy on your shoulders, but you underestimate the people living in it.”  
  
“What’s to underestimate?” he asked, looking up at her face, the sharpness of his question melting under a blossoming warmth. “A frail pocket of Resistance, grown out of a misguided Rebellion?”  
  
“Yes,” she said. “People like me.”  
  
She speared a slice of fruit on the knife and took it between her teeth, bent down towards his face, and pushed the slice through his parted lips with her tongue. There was a burst of wet, tangy sweetness that coated the cavern of his mouth.  
  
He grew hard beneath her, and she began grinding herself against him, just enough to make him sigh, the juice from the fruit leaving a layer of deep red on his lower lip. No sense letting any of it go to waste—she lapped up the redness, tongue slipping over the circle of his lips.  
  
His hands slipped past the hem of her undergarments, edging the fabric down so he could reach the swell of her ass cheeks and stroke them with his fingertips, kneading with his thumbs. This made her grind against him more deeply, extracting from him deep breaths that smelled like meiloorun.  
  
“Your shirt…” he mumbled.  
  
She lay the plate and knife down on the bed beside him and pulled her top off. Her nipples perked up in the balmy air.  
  
He took a single slice of fruit between his fingers and poised it at her mouth.  
  
“Keep it there,” he said, leaving the slice between her teeth.  
  
With fruit-tinged fingers, he traced a sticky red line down her chest, over the crest of her left breast, ending right on her nipple.  
  
Rey struggled to keep her teeth light on the slice in her mouth, while the juices gathered with her spit. When she turned her neck up to keep it from slipping out, he bent his head down and opened his mouth against her breast. His tongue followed the line his fingers had made, making the slow journey to her nipple. He sucked at the nub with relish, drawing it full past his lips to feel the broad side of his tongue.  
  
Rey could feel the fruit in her mouth threatening to melt away, red was already trickling down the corners of her lips. But he kept his mouth around the nipple, as though he liked the taste of it.  
  
This was becoming unbearable. She was wet through her undergarments, her legs stretching out behind his back.  
  
He looked back at her face, smiling slightly, enjoying her torment. His tongue slid over the slice of fruit, as her tongue pressed against it from the other side, the deep red staining their chins as they kept the slice suspended between them. He finally let her push it into his mouth. But he pressed one hand at the back of her head, keeping her mouth sealed against his, to let the pulped flesh pass back in between. When she swallowed, hot sweetness oozed all the way down her throat.  
  
  
By the time they had finished, there was only the flesh of the meiloorun left attracting night flies on the table. There was still some of the juice left on her collar bone, and sticky patches all over her fingers, but they were spent, and night had fallen deep outside.  
  
Rey stretched out beneath the thin blanket, satisfied as a cat, wondering if all their arguments would end like this. There would be open arguments from now on, she was sure of it. But somehow, that didn’t seem too bad.  
  
He was already asleep, she could tell by the way his chest rose and fell. Rey caught one last look at the crystal sitting in the palm of his hand, a thin trace of moonlight from outside giving it a ghostly sheen.  
  
The crystal—  
  
  
_—she had been tugging at the crystal around her neck. Funny how old nervous habits never quite left. Even now, when there was nothing to be nervous about anymore._  
  
_The elevator rumbled down, the lights past the little gap in the door trailing upwards._  
  
_“Always wondered how I’d die,” she said, looking up at her companion._  
  
_He chuckled at that, wheezing through the cracks in his ribs._  
  
_“As far as deaths go, this isn’t bad,” he said. Even tired beyond all reckoning, he managed to be handsome. “Mission accomplished. No regrets.”_  
  
_Somewhere past the armored elevator shaft, the explosions continued, but they would cease to be a concern soon enough._  
  
_“I do have one regret,” she said._  
  
_He gave her a questioning look, one hand pressed against the wound at his side. She hesitated for only a moment._  
  
_“It would have been nice to get to know you more,” she said. “To have had the time.”_  
  
_He broke into a smile that made every strain and care disappear from his face. They had been standing against each other in an attempt to remain on their feet, but now he turned towards her._  
  
_“Very well,” he said. “What would you like to know?”_  
  
_“I don’t know,” she momentarily forgot the swollen throb in her left knee. “What’s your favorite color? Favorite food?”_  
  
_“Green. And quesadillas. You?”_  
  
_“Um. Deep purple. Like the last shade of purple you see before the sun sets. And I really like bantha milkshakes.”_  
  
_She grinned, but the mirth quickly disappeared. “What’s the worse thing you’ve ever done?”_  
  
_He didn’t even need to think of it._  
  
_“After my parents died, I was raised by an uncle,” he said. “A kind man. But some years down the line, we received a tip that he’d been feeding intel to the Empire. I didn’t want to believe it. I did everything I could to prove the tip wrong. But it wasn’t. So I pulled the trigger myself.”_  
  
_She briefly looked away. “I’m sorry.”_  
  
_“So am I,” he said, the voice of a person weighed down by years. “You probably have some stories—“_  
  
_“It was with Saw,” she said. “I was 14. He said blowing up the hospital would hobble Imperial presence in the city. I planted the charges.”_  
  
_It was his turn to look horrified._  
  
_“The terrible thing was I didn’t even think much of it. It wasn’t until a few years later that I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking there were so many children in that hospital…” she watched his face, waited for the condescension, the anger. There was none._  
  
_Instead he leaned in a bit closer._  
  
_“But what’s the best thing you’ve ever done?” he asked._  
  
_“I don’t know. Convincing a bunch of rubes to steal the Death Star plans, maybe.”_  
  
_He grinned. “Best thing I’ve done was being one of those rubes.”_  
  
_The indicator above the door showed that they were approaching ground level. She looked up at him, and drawing on the last reserves of her strength, went up on her tiptoes, so she could kiss him in the mouth. The last kiss she would ever give, and the last she would ever receive._  
  
_His other hand wound into her hair, holding her there, as the moment stretched out, into the months and years they could have had—mornings strolling the base, afternoons on missions, evenings in the mess hall with all their friends—until the moment pulled taut and snapped._  
  
_The elevator shuddered to a halt and the doors swept open. Outside, the world was a stark white._  
  
_Underneath the countless pains, the exhaustions, a delicious thrill wound up her belly. She could have laughed out loud._  
  
_He was leaning into her, and she into him, on their way out the doors._  
  
_“Want to go down to the beach?” he asked._  
  
_“Ohh, yes,” she said, “I love oceans.”_  
  
  
Rey’s eyes opened, her blood racing over an appointment with destruction that had not belonged to her.  
  
The ozone stink in the elevator was still in her nose. Rey was awash in her—whoever she had been’s last ebbing spikes of adrenaline. And him—the tiredness in his voice—his name had been at the forefront of her mind, but now it was gone, and throw herself as she did into the gray haze that remained of dreams, she could not remember his name.  
  
Something shifted beside her. Kylo was sitting up, his head in his hands.  
  
Before she could ask what that was—a dream? A vision?—he spoke.  
  
“Rogue Leader Jyn Erso and Captain Cassian Andor,” he said, in a small, distant voice. “My mother used to tell me stories about them.”  
  
Rogue Leader. That was Master Luke’s designation as an X-wing pilot. ‘I would have been Rogue One,’ he had once told her. ‘But that name belongs to the crew that paved the way for the Rebellion’s victory.’  
  
“They were the rebel scum,” Rey said. Their steely determination still pounded in her chest.  
  
Kylo turned to her, paused.  
  
“You’re weeping,” he said.  
  
The moonlight touched his face. “So are you,” she said.  
  
  
They were holding up the line at the docks. It was his transport that had arrived, and there was no reason why she should have accompanied him, but she had felt the want to. They had walked together in silence, yesterday’s argument completely dried up.  
  
He turned to her one more time. Underneath his hood he managed tenuous stillness.  
  
“You should keep this,” he said, putting the kyber crystal necklace in her hand.  
  
It was warm in her palm and on her fingers closing around it.  
  
She looked up at him, perfectly serious. “You know I can use this to kill you one day, right?”  
  
He shifted so she caught a glimpse of his eyes, at the cataclysm behind them.  
  
“You just might,” he said.  
  
He suddenly bent down, ignoring the flurry of the cue behind, to kiss her. It was brief, light on her lips, his nose brushing against hers, and then he had turned away to go.  
  
It was one of any number of kisses that had passed between them, but as Rey stood at the dock watching his transport chug away, it occurred to her that he had never kissed her good-bye before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was written with the aid of a generous amount of rum and Rogue One feelings pent up since I saw it last year (saw it thrice. In three consecutive days. Like a crazy person). 
> 
> I'm going to say that you can read Jyn and Cassian's relationship either way - it could be platonic, it could be romantic. I personally think they should have been making out on the beach, not even because they necessarily love each other, just that they're bout to die and Felicity Jones / Diego Luna is RIGHT THERE and if you must greet oblivion you might as well do it with some o that sweet sugar.
> 
> Also, I don't actually know what a meiloorun's color is.
> 
> Next chapter should be up by Tuesday. If you haven't subscribed yet, suggest that you do so as not to miss any updates :).


	5. On exclusivity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So putting this here in response to some of the comments I'd gotten: This chapter contains threesomes and polyamory, which if it's not your thing, then consider this a warning. I've also updated the tags to reflect this (didn't bother tagging it in the start, because it's kinda a spoiler, and I tend to just update tags when the content referred to appears in the story).
> 
> That said, although this is a one-off chapter, it is still consistent with how I view this version of the characters. But if this is not everyone's cup of tea, I totally understand.

D’QAR  
Resistance Base  
Poe Dameron’s room  
  
  
Keeping the noise level down to a minimum was easier said than done. She’d managed to smother the throatier moaning, but her gasps were coming in bursts that carried over the creak of the bed springs, the thump of the backrest against the wall, intermingling with the breaths that came from beneath and behind her.  
  
“I’m—“ she lost the last of the words in an undignified wheeze.  
  
She pressed her elbows down on the mattress over Finn’s shoulders, trying to keep herself aloft. Beneath her, a smile briefly flickered through his features. But then his eyes drifted half-shut and he drove into her deep, making her arch her back.  
  
“I’m—“ she tried again.  
  
“You’re…?” Poe’s murmur tickled her ear from behind. He had one hand resting on her hip, the other’s fingers were intertwined in Finn’s.  
  
“I’m—“ she was straining her neck upwards, like she were trying to stretch herself out, to contain them both. But while Finn was fucking her cunt briskly, Poe was taking his time on her ass, and the disjointed friction was threatening to overwhelm her.  
  
Poe leaned into her neck, chin against her collarbone, as Finn propped himself up towards her face, his lips soft against the hardened line of her jaw.  
  
“Yes, you are,” Finn whispered against her mouth.  
  
She grit her teeth, tried to and failed to keep from crying out, giving herself over entirely to the wave that rushed her, like a blinding light going off behind her eyes, leaving her toes numb.  
  
Poe gave a muted “kriff”, and Finn released his pent-up breath in an exhalation that seemed to wash over the room.  
  
And then came the chuckling, and the process of disentangling.  
  
Rey bent forward and kissed Finn in the mouth, until Poe tugged her back, so he could kiss her, and then Finn yanked him down, so he could kiss him.  
  
It was Poe’s bed, and its most regular co-occupant was Finn, but every now and then an invitation reached Rey, and she never said no.  
  
“So who’s next in the middle then?” Finn asked.  
  
“I volunteer,” Rey said, smiling a bit too widely.  
  
Poe gave her ass a pinch. “Don’t be greedy, scavenger, you’ve already had us both.”  
  
Finn cupped his fingers behind his head, the muscles of his arms still tensed.  
  
“I know what this is,” he said, grinning. “She wants the other guy.”  
  
Rey, rolled onto her belly, summoned a confused expression. “What other guy?”  
  
Poe rested his chin on the base of his palm. His eyes were twinkling. “Guy. Girl. The person you keep running off to meet.”  
  
“There is no—“  
  
“Rey,” Finn gave her a look a teacher might have given a youngling. “All these new solo missions? The suspicious lack of detail in your debriefings?”  
  
“The necklace BB-8 saw in your box of stuff?” Poe chimed in.  
  
She looked up sharply at that. The box contained her lightsaber and the kyber crystal, but in the hidden compartment was a First Order datapad / communicator, and a nondescript scrap of black gauze.  
  
Poe shrugged. “He wasn’t spying, he just caught you looking at it.”  
  
“There’s a running bet,” Finn said. “I’ve got my money on it being some dark and mysterious stranger you met while journeying with Skywalker. Some kind of Force-type.”  
  
“The pilots are split,” Poe added. “Half of them think it might be a smuggler who jumps around the outer rim, the other half thinks its an accounts manager from one of the core worlds. Jess Pava claims it’s her, maybe you want to make that a reality sometime, Rey.”  
  
“I overheard Skywalker telling the General it was probably Kylo Ren,” Finn said.  
  
Both Finn and Poe laughed at that, while Rey bit her lower lip.  
  
“Okay fine, don’t tell us who it is,” Finn shrugged. “But they know about this right?” He gestured at the three of them, in bed. “You have to be honest about these things.”  
  
“He knows,” Rey said, rolling her eyes at the gleeful “gotcha” expression on both their faces.  
  
“I’m not the only one he fucks either,” she said. It was one of their rules - they could fuck whoever they pleased. He had once even made a vague half-smiling reference toward “a blonde and a redhead.”  
  
  
  
FINALIZER  
First Order Resurgent-class Battlecruiser  
General Armitage Hux’s suite  
  
  
“So who is she?” Hux asked, from his corner of the bed.  
  
Kylo pretended not to hear. His head rested on Phasma’s lap, and he was still licking the taste of her off his fingers.  
  
“Or is it a he?” Hux was seated across them, skin pink from all the exertions of the evening. “It would certainly explain why you suddenly enjoy getting filled from behind. Is it one of the Knights?”  
  
Kylo lifted himself up, edging towards Hux so he could look the General in the face. Phasma watched without a word, but she settled back on the pillows, as though this were a show she’d seen many times before, and enjoyed.  
  
“What are you babbling about?”  
  
Hux’s hair, usually impeccable, was in disarray around his face. It was almost endearing.  
  
“Just tell me that it’s human. I wouldn’t put it past you to rut with the alien filth, but I will not have you carrying their taint into my chambers,” he looked down at Kylo’s legs with that pointed sneer. “You already insist on wearing your fucking boots to bed, I don’t know why I put up with you.”  
  
“Why, General?” Kylo smiled unpleasantly, pushing his face towards Hux’s, close enough to see the urge to recoil. Goading the man had such piquancies. “Does it fill you with insecurity to know that your ministrations aren’t enough for me?”  
  
“To sate the whole of your monstrous appetites?” Hux snorted. “I don’t fight battles I can’t win.”  
  
“Then who else I fuck should be of no concern of yours.”  
  
“It is a concern for the First Order,” Hux blustered. “Anything that proves a distraction for its favoured guard dog is an obstacle that has to be removed.”  
  
A sudden surge of anger arose, and Kylo just barely forced it down.  
  
“I am not distracted,” he said hotly.  
  
“Oh really? Captain—” Hux’s steely glare did not move from Kylo’s face. “How long has it been since the last time Ren destroyed a console?”  
  
“Three months, twenty-seven days, two hours,” Phasma intoned. “A new record.”  
  
“He seems smitten, doesn’t he?”  
  
“Infuriated, sir,” she said. “He is being infuriated.”  
  
That made both Hux and Kylo turn to where she lay, her hand resting on a raised knee so they could see the wet stripe of her cunt. There was an easy, predatory confidence to her, that was not diminished by whether or not she was in armor.  
  
“He has not been rejected, but he is still being denied what he wants most,” Phasma said. “By a woman.”  
  
Kylo shot her a look of warning, which she returned with the smallest lowering of her gaze. A grin was hidden under the gaunt lines of her face.  
  
  
“Tell us about him, at least,” Finn said, the blanket catching on his knees when he turned towards her.  
  
“He’s—“ Rey struggled for the word.  
  
“Don’t say ‘complicated’,” Poe said. “I hate that word, it’s a catch-all term for an umbrella of glorious personal deficiencies.”  
  
“He’s not exactly easy to deal with,” Rey said. “Well. No. Actually—that’s been easier than I thought it would be. But there are _complications_.”  
  
“Because you’re in the Resistance?” Poe asked. “No need to tell me how that can complicate things.”  
  
“Yes,” Rey said. That was true at least. “Among other things.”  
  
“Well if it goes well, it goes well, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t,” Poe shrugged.  
  
“But look at her,” Finn said. “She’s so...preoccupied by this person.”  
  
Not for the first time, Rey considered just telling them. But the thought of it made her stomach drop - she had a dozen ideas of how they’d react to knowing, but above it all floated the certainty that if the secret ever left her lips, it would all be over.  
  
And that wasn’t something she was ready for, just yet.  
  
Rey smiled nervously. “Look, one day I’ll tell you everything, and you’ll understand how fucked my situation is. But for now, I’m just sort of waiting to see how it pans out…”  
  
She trailed off. _One of us will have to give, eventually_ , she thought.  
  
As she thought it, she had a notion of Kylo sitting on the bed—not this bed, a bigger one, the sheets dark and crisp except where someone had tracked their shoes on it—his back to her. The lights were dim where he was, but she could see the sheen of sweat down his spine. She said nothing, but it was as though he heard her anyway.  
  
  
She was lying on her belly on a bed of old white linen, chin resting on her forearm. She’d just had sex, he could almost smell it off her, could almost hear the familiar rhythm of her breathing. All he had to do was reach out, and he’d be able to touch the back of her leg. She looked up—did she see him? If he whispered her name, he knew she’d hear—but would she respond…?  
  
Right in front of his face was Hux, and he was bristling.  
  
“Don’t tell me you’re having a vision or something,” he shook his head. “I will never understand this sorcery.”  
  
With an effort, Kylo brought himself back into the present, ignoring the pounding in his chest.  
  
“Hardly sorcery,” he said, giving the General a curt look.  
  
He made a gesture and Hux fell onto his back, as though he’d been shoved. “I was just wondering how tight your ass is going to feel.”  
  
An expletive was halfway out Hux’s mouth when Kylo nodded to Phasma.  
  
“Captain,” he said. “Hold him down.”  
  
She was suddenly upon Hux, pinning his arms down over his head with one hand. With the other, she handed Kylo the discreet bottle of lube.  
  
Red flooded Hux’s face, all trace of his formal rigidity gone. “How _dare_ the both of you—“  
  
“Now, now, General,” Kylo smeared his dick with lube. He made sure Hux could see it. “Rest assured that I will not tire of dealing with you.”  
  
Hux resisted—he always did in the beginning. But Phasma pulled his wrists up on the bed, and Kylo scooped Hux’s legs up, pushing them towards his shoulders.  
  
“Ren—“ his teeth were grit, face burning.  
  
Kylo shoved himself into Hux’s ass hard, deep, and the tightness of the General’s face just unraveled.  
  
“Ren,” he said again, in a much-changed voice.  
  
Kylo looked up at Phasma, her forearms down on Hux’s wrists. She was no longer hiding that smile.  
  
“Enjoying this, Captain?” Kylo asked.  
  
“Quite so, sir.”  
  
“Good,” Kylo went faster, bending Hux’s legs back as far as they would go, but keeping his eye right on Phasma’s face. “Because you’re next.”  
  
  
“She’s gone,” Finn muttered. “Miles away.”  
  
Rey heard it as though from underwater. She had no idea where Kylo was at the moment, but she had a very good idea of what he was doing.  
  
“Rey?” Finn tried again. Both his and Poe’s faces floated into view.  
  
“And—now she’s back,” Finn grinned. “Where were you?”  
  
She blinked, dragging herself back to the room, noticing rather belatedly that she was wet again.  
  
“Oh,” she gave them both a smile. “I was just thinking…”  
  
“Thinking what?”  
  
She looked right into Poe Dameron’s face. “That you must be the most beautiful person in this whole damn Resistance.”  
  
Poe laughed at that.  
  
“Hear hear,” Finn said, reaching up towards Poe and catching his neck in the crook of his arm. Poe’s face softened as Finn drew him in for a kiss - entirely devoid of care or worry, nothing hidden, nothing held back.  
  
Rey wondered, briefly, what it would be like to kiss _him_ like that. If that were even possible. There was a bladed edge to that thought, and it bit into her deeply.  
  
“Fine,” Poe made a sign of mock surrender and pointed at Rey. “You’re back in the middle.”  
  
She brought herself up, shaking away the sadness. She put on a serious tone. “Roger, Black Leader.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my notes this chapter was called "Threesomes of the Light and Dark". Fyi, I never imagined Rey and Ren being monogamous :D. Their attachment to each other is not based on the fact that they can't get tail anywhere else if they so desired. 
> 
> Was actually pretty excited about writing this, it was originally supposed to be a one-off story in between 'Behind the Storm' and 'In The Middle of the Blue Ocean' (something about Rey and Ren being determined to put their tryst behind them, but somewhat failing, and the fact of this arising when they have sexytime with other people). But I prefer it here, becoming a venue for "what other people sorta know about the secret things they do."
> 
> Also, Hux is a -treat- to write. If Rey and Ren turn out to be cousins, I will crack-ship Rey and Hux, just because that sweet antagonist-protagonist sexual tension must be met somewhere (guess we'll find out in THE LAST JEDI I am so excited over that title :D ).
> 
> Next chapter up by Fridayyyyyy.


	6. On war

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the risk of being rather spoilery, I've updated the tags of this fic again, to reflect stuff that'll happen in one form or another here on out. You may wanna check that out :). 
> 
> Also, things will get Darker. Not like -super- dark, but a bit darker than before, which is not to say there won't be Light either (flails arms shrugs) ehh you'll see.

TAKODANA  
Battle at the Grove of Tears  
  
  
The spindly overgrowth swayed with the evening breeze, their stalks creaking, sending a flurry of knife-shaped leaves whirling around Kylo Ren’s shoulders.  
  
She was around here, somewhere.  
  
The towering canes blocked out the view of the landing fields, and the drum of the gun emplacements, so he could almost imagine he was in another world entirely, one disturbed only by the whisper of her. Was she among the trees? Behind the moss-covered rocks?  
  
With a twist half of annoyance and half of admiration, he realized she was deliberately hiding her presence with the Force. He hadn’t even known she could do that. But if he could not pinpoint her, she would attack by surprise.  
  
He drew his lightsaber, flipped the switch, singing a falling leaf on the sizzling red beam.  
  
The leaves cast shadows as they tumbled down, quivering like the wings of tiny insects. For a moment he was mesmerised by their gentle fall, only noticing at the last moment that a shadow, larger than all the others, had come down around him, and his saber shot up to meet hers in mid-slice, at full force from where she had leapt down from the trees. The crack echoed in the grove.  
  
He parried her back, but she landed on her feet, still in complete silence.  
  
That lightsaber was new. The blade was a brilliant gold, issuing from a hilt that had the same fittings as her quarterstaff. So she had made use of that kyber crystal after all.  
  
He strode forward, lightsaber swiveling in his grip. There was no need to rush. This was a familiar dance.  
  
She dodged his strikes, a single step to the left or right, never straying far, keeping her own blade between them.  
  
She was not going to speak to him, and he was not going to speak to her, because among all the rules they had, what they held above all was that whenever the time came for war, there was only war between them. This was what made all their other decisions bearable.  
  
He carved a scorching arc through a clump of green stalks, but at the point she might have slipped aside, she spun on her heel and struck. The tip of her blade caught him in the shoulder, the pain immediate, searing.  
  
But underneath the mask, he smirked. He greatly preferred her with the lightsaber than with the blaster, as he had first seen her, fumbling with the safety and firing haphazardly at him. Hadn’t that been on this very planet?  
  
He balled his hand into a fist and began slamming it into the wound. The pain flowered red, filling his mind with needle jabs.  
  
Warily, she stepped back. She didn’t know what to expect—good, he had a surprise for her. He drew on the pain, sharpened it into an edge with which he dug into the Force, summoning power to himself.  
  
She raised her saber high in anticipation, resolve tensioning her every muscle. He looked at her face and an acute sense of frustration bit into him. She was _wasted_ on the Light.  
  
Power flowed down into the hand of his wounded arm, but the Force coursed through it, animated it. She had to know the power of the Dark Side - he was going to demonstrate it to her.  
  
The Force surged through the palm of his hand, heat and energy building up excruciatingly in his bones, making his fingers spasm. He raised his hand toward her, energy forcing his hand to unclench, and blasting out through the tips of his fingers in a crackling web of lightning that lit up the entire glade.  
  
She cried out as it caught her full in the torso.  
  
He could not sustain the lightning for long, it was only recently that he’d discovered the technique in Bastila’s holocron. But the burst was enough to knock her down to her knees, contorting under the crackle before it faded away.  
  
Silence momentarily returned to the grove as smoke arose from her robes.

Anyone else would have admitted defeat. He'd seen it before - hardened warriors had been reduced to grovelling before him.

But she--she was not just anyone.  
  
He was unsurprised when she stirred. Slowly, she turned her face up towards him. And—there it was.  
  
Rage.  
  
She pushed herself back onto her feet, the pure rage arising off her just as electric. She wanted to tear him to shreds, he could feel it. He opened his arms out towards her, inviting her to try.  
  
In the time it took for him to blink, she had crossed the space between them, saber burning. Shocked at her speed, he stepped back, his own saber rising reflexively to bat off a sudden succession of blows.  
  
As he stepped back, he saw the smallest movement of her thumb over a switch on her saber, and a second beam of gold light erupted from the bottom end of the hilt. Now it wasn’t one blade he had to guard against, it was two, blurring into a ring of fire as she rushed him, twirling the saber at her wrist.  
  
He met her attack with heavy smashes that threatened to break the chain of her movements, but she was drawing deeply on her anger--did she even realize she was doing that?--it suffused her, allowed her to absorb his strikes, returning every one of his with three of her own.  
  
He held his ground, refusing to be pushed back. At the smallest opening he hammered down with all his strength. But she allowed it to fall past her and moved in, locking the beam of his lightsaber against the bottom blade of hers. This left him open. The upper blade, she inched towards his neck.  
  
She had won, or at least she thought she did. Kylo’s mask was bathed in the sun-like glow of her saber. But red light flared up beneath her chin and shock registered on her face - he had one of his crossguard blades pointed directly between her breasts.  
  
They stood that way, exhalations deep, refusing to give or receive quarter, their blades locked in a tenuous balance.  
  
Only then did he reach out to her with his mind.  
  
_Give in._  
  
In the red glare, a change come upon her. It was like her anger had just vanished—he had never understood how she was able to do that, just letting her anger drain away like it was nothing at all. What remained now was stone-faced determination.  
  
_You give in_ , she thought back.

Something else crossed her expression, something he couldn’t quite place - a strange flicker of sadness, and it occurred to him that neither of them had actually been referring to the fight at hand.

He wanted to say her name, to whisper it to her, just between the two of them.  
  
But somewhere out of sight a twig snapped in half, and they realized that they weren’t alone.  
  
Several presences had entered the grove, their thrum as familiar to Kylo as the beat of his own heart.  
  
In the moment she was distracted, he drew on the Force and pushed her away, driving her back into the middle of the glade. From somewhere in the trees came a blaster bolt streaking directly towards Rey.  
  
She threw her saber up just in time to deflect it to the side, but already the Knights were coming out from between the stalks, like shadows under a rain of leaves.  
  
The Heavy came up last, lifting the cleaver sword off his shoulders and thrusting it into the ground.  
  
“Pardon the intrusion,” he said, voice booming through his mask’s voice modulator. “Were you two having a moment? Sorry to disturb.”  
  
Kylo turned towards Rey. There was no way she could defeat all of them. She knew as much. She still held her saber aloft, but she was straining to keep down panic.  
  
The Sniper snapped the blaster back to her shoulder, ready to fire again.  
  
But then came the shriek of an X-wing flying low overhead, Kylo watched it disappear out the corner of his eye. Following it was the tell-tale crump of payload hitting ground. Just over the far edge of the stalks, flames bloomed.  
  
Rey turned tail and ran, disappearing quickly in the overgrowth.  
  
The Armoury turned to Kylo. “Do we pursue?”  
  
“No,” he replied, killing the beam of his lightsaber. “Their reinforcements have arrived. We pull back, for now.”  
  
The Rogue straightened up from the rock she had been leaning against.

“Don’t worry, Master,” she said. “You’ll get her next time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, yeah, pretty short, and not smutty, but this has actually been my favorite chapter of all the chapters I've written for this trilogy so far (including the chapters that have yet to be posted) :).
> 
> Not-entirely-suppressed belligerent sexual tension between an antagonist and protagonist is the pitch on which I build my fortress. And in case you haven't noticed, I. Love. Fight scenes. (This one played out in my mind like a Gennedy Tartakovsky animation). Also, I realize the Knights of Ren have neither canon names or personalities yet, but I have headcanon'd the shit out of all of them. 
> 
> Next chapter up by Tuesday.


	7. On chains

NABOO  
Lake Country  
  
  
Rey peered out through the heavy curtains at the stretch of green outside the rented chateau.  
  
“You should see this, Ren,” she said.   
  
No response from behind her.  
  
“The sun’s hitting the stream, it’s all sparkly. And the shaaks are back. Those big ones from earlier. I think they’re grazing.”  
  
There was a low, inarticulate grunt, and the gentle clink of metal.  
  
“Would you like to see?” Rey asked, pulling up the over-large robe that sat on her shoulders, opened at the middle, to show that she was wearing nothing underneath it.  
  
He was on his knees on the carpet, bent towards the floor. At her question, he looked up, the slice of sun from the parted drapes catching the beads of sweat that ran down the scar on his face, and under the black blindfold. He was lost in the far reaches of pain, where it bordered on ecstasy.  
  
Rey made a small movement of her fingers, just the tips of them visible past the cut of her sleeve. The golden links that snaked around his limbs tightened, pulling his arms back like a bird’s wings, coiling around his elbows, forcing them to twist into an angle that made him bite into his gag.   
  
Rey watched the hollows of his shoulders deepening, wondering how long she could keep him like that. She bit her lip.   
  
“Didn’t think so,” she murmured.  
  
  
It had begun with an idle thought that had appeared in Rey’s mind while she was watching the D’Qar Base ground crew hooking up stacks of crates to the cargo lifts. The winches hung from fat industrial chains that clacked as they tensed. Could she snap that chain with the Force, if she wanted to? Could Kylo Ren? The two thoughts had met and merged and produced an image that given her a flutter unnoticed by anyone else.  
  
That same afternoon, she had sent him a few suggestive pics from her datapad. He had responded with a simple ‘huh.’   
  
‘For you?’ his next message had asked.  
  
‘No, you.’  
  
It had been a full hour until he had responded again.  
  
‘Where are you even going to get all that stuff?’  
  
‘Same place I got the images,’ she had said. The holonet.  
  
Another long pause.  
  
‘I just got out of a bacta tank,’ he had written. ‘Do you intend on putting me back in?’  
  
‘No,’ she had snickered at that, as she typed. ‘I’ll be very careful, I promise.’  
  
They had a rule about that - being careful in what they did to one another. It came with the territory, given the strength they both possessed. But despite the odd bruise, or bite, or scratch, that rule had never actually been tested before.  
  
‘If you’re worried that it’s going to hurt, I can go really really easy on you,’ she had added, although if there was one thing she knew about him—from every duel, conversation, and fuck—it was that he could stand a little physical pain. A lot of it, actually.  
  
Harnessing the Dark Side actually made him seek out pain sometimes, Rey mused.  
  
Sure enough, he had responded, ’It’s not the pain that concerns me.’  
  
She didn’t have to ask to know what it was. Finding himself in a position of helplessness rankled him, but it had quite the opposite effect on Rey.   
  
‘If it goes somewhere you don’t like, you can always break out of it,’ she had said. She had determined that she could snap a chain purely on her will and the Force, if she really needed to. And if she could, so could he.  
  
‘Oh, and all the how-to sites say we should have an abort phrase, just in case,’ she added. ‘The word will be “ewok.”’  
  
‘I don’t imagine I’ll be able to speak.’  
  
‘Then just think it really loudly.’  
  
She had imagined him roving the Finalizer with the images in his mind. Pity the stormtrooper who crossed him then.  
  
‘We can try? Just to see? How it goes?’  
  
He had finally answered, ‘fine.’  
  
In the chateau’s drawing room, curtains shut, lights set low, he had undressed rather warily. Probably because she had at the same time began bringing out the chains from her pack. There seemed to be such a great length of it jingling down onto the carpet.  
  
“What is that?” he’d asked.  
  
“This? It goes into your mouth.”  
  
“No, I meant that,” he gestured towards the other end of a length of chain.  
  
“Oh, that. It goes up your ass,” Rey said.  
  
His face had changed color so quickly, Rey had to bite back a laugh.  
  
“I do appreciate this,” she had said.  
  
For some reason, that had made his color deepen. “You fucking well better,” he had muttered.  
  
  
Rey made a slow circuit around him, the edge of her robe brushing the carpet.  
  
The chains connected to bands that wound around his neck, knees and elbows, wrists and ankles, to rings on every segment of every one of his fingers. They coursed through to metal loops, one of which rested on his chest, and the other at his back, square between the shoulders. Rey could manipulate the chains as surely as she would have a puppet’s strings.  
  
She had pulled him into some distracting shapes, testing the strain of his muscles, the range of his joints, pushing as far as she dared, and then just a bit more, until clinched groans rose up from his throat.  
  
Now, she made a gesture like she were squeezing something in her grip, and the chains shifted, dragging his torso up by the shoulders. With every link of the chain slipping through the metal loops, the gag was pulled further down into his mouth, the phallus pressing deeper up his ass.   
  
A high, tight gasp escaped the gag, a thin line of drool trickling down the corner of his mouth.   
  
She turned her hand to the side, like she were turning a dial, and the little rings on his fingers reacted, twisting his wrists outwards, the bones threatening to pop.  
  
He did not ask her to stop.  
  
  
He had resisted at first, involuntarily, tensing against the pull of the chains as they brought him down to kneel on the carpet.   
  
“Comfortable?” she had asked.  
  
“As comfortable as I’m going to get.”  
  
She leaned towards him, close enough to smell the salt of his skin, her eyes level to his.  
  
“Cede your will to me, entirely,” she had said, echoing the words he had spoken to her in an entirely different place, although it had also been in shadow, and it had been her on the brink of surrendering control.  
  
Voice soft, he had replied, “I’m yours.”  
  
She held the gag to his lips and he bit on it while she strapped it behind his head. He was supplicant now, waiting on her lead. That made her smile.   
  
“One more thing.”  
  
From the pocket of her robe she pulled out a black scrap of gauze that had once belonged to a piece of saucy undergarment that he had torn apart while she was wearing it. She draped the cloth across his eyes, knotting it at the back of his head.   
  
And then she had stepped back and observed him, at the way his breathing had grown pointed, at the engorgement of his dick.   
  
“Perfect,” she had said.  
  
  
Rey’s own breathing grew tremulous. She idly strummed at herself between her legs, as the chains pulled him all the way back, so the back of his head touched the carpet. His legs were folded under his thighs, arms bent, tucked at his back. With another gesture, his spine arched upwards, chin forced out, so that his torso was a smooth crescent of tensed muscle, with his dick rigid on his belly.  
  
A new thought came to her, a temptation that made her tight just to consider. She could do _anything_ with him like this.  
  
Rey knelt down next to him, touching the tip of her nail to the base of his balls. He trembled, heaving against the chains, as she traced a line that went up the shaft of his dick, up his chest, and toward his neck.  
  
She put her finger against his throat, light enough that he would have barely felt it, but underneath his trachea constricted.  
  
Shock burst through him—fear—his line of air suddenly reduced to a thin stream that only just allowed him to remain conscious. She could feel his heart pounding as though it were hers, his mind screaming for him to escape.   
  
A dark rush overtook her, surprising in its suddenness, and its sweetness.  
  
As he shuddered, she stroked the underside of his chin, wondering how much pressure she’d have to put to kill him. It wouldn’t take much. She could close his throat up before he even reacted. It was that easy.  
  
He’d deserve it, wouldn’t he? After everything he’d done.  
  
He was struggling now, under her hold. People would _thank her_ for ending him.  
  
And she didn’t have to stop with him. Everyone who deserved it—Unkat Plutt’s face came to mind, how he’d scrabble at his throat as he choked—those two rat shits Devi and Strunk—the scavengers who had forced her into the old crumbling ventilation shafts of downed starships to salvage parts, even if her knees were raw, and her knuckles bleeding—her family—  
  
She froze. Her family. Their faces were blurs in her memory—the shuttle had taken off as she had screamed at the sky, and the pain that had left behind was like a crater in her chest—over months, years, she had sanded down the jagged edges of that pain with the thought that they’d come back, of course they’d come back—but if their throats were beneath her hands, would they finally answer why—why had they never returned?  
  
Her stomach turned. All of a sudden, it was like she couldn’t recognize herself. Quickly, she turned her back on the precipice that had unknowingly opened up before her feet, leaping away before it swallowed her whole.  
  
She released his throat and he breathed in greedily, seemingly unaware of how far her thoughts had gone.  
  
Trying to rid herself of the sourness that persisted in her mind, she reached out for his dick. His breaths sharpened at the tightness of her hold, and she tugged, aggressively, making the lines deepen on his face, until he came, moaning into the gag, streaming and flecking white all over his torso.  
  
Only then did the clutch of the chains relax, and he fell back, limbs untangling, breathing as hard as she was.  
  
  
The chains sat in a harmless pile beside them. He had not wanted to rise from the carpet, so she sat there with him, in the column of light made by the slightly parted curtains. His head rested on her lap.   
  
“That—” he said. “Well, that had its moments.”  
  
“So you’d do it again?” she asked, with a small smile.  
  
He tugged at the black ribbon that had at some point, slid down to his collar. “Maybe,” he said.  
  
As she tucked a lock of hair behind his ear, he turned up to her.   
  
“The answer to your other question is ‘yes’,” he said.  
  
“What other question?”  
  
“The one that was in your mind while you were choking me. ‘Does it always feel this good to hold someone’s life in your hands?’ The answer is yes.”  
  
She quieted at that, at the touch of air from the yawning abyss.  
  
“I don’t think I’d agree with that,” she said, her voice stiffening.  
  
His gaze did not waver. She suddenly had the feeling he could keep her right where she was, just with that look.  
  
“If one day you change your mind, tell me,” he said, reaching up and touching the line of her neck, as she had done to him, “And I will show you how to break your chains for good.”  
  
She felt a chill at his touch.  
  
“Still trying to seduce me to the Darkness?” she asked.  
  
He shrugged, as though it were the most trivial thing in the world, but his eyes never left her. “I want you at my side. Was that ever a secret?”  
  
“No,” she said, finding that she could not quite look away. “I suppose not.”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "...Through power I gain victory/ Through victory my chains are broken/ The Force shall free me" - Sith Code. 
> 
> Meanwhile, real life writing-for-money is going to be taking up some of my time, so updates in the next couple of weeks maaaay slow down a bit (writing copy for a construction company guys do you see why I need fanfiction in my life). Will still strive for 2x a week, but we shall see.
> 
> Next update should be by Saturday.


	8. On pretending I

LAH’MU  
Equatorial Continent  
Where the Stones Reach for the Heavens  
  
  
The shimmer of Lah’mu’s planetary ring looked from the ground like a broad streak of paint arching directly overhead, as pale as the soil beneath was black.  
  
Kylo Ren, in full raiment and mask, stood like something molded from that very earth, waiting on a hilltop from which he could see for miles around. He had been watching the exhaust trail of the oncoming speeder for the last few minutes, tracing its approach through the charcoal-colored slopes, and between the monstrous rock obelisks that had inspired legends of an ancient lost civilization that had used those standing stones to divine the stars.  
  
The speeder came to a halt at the foot of the knoll and Rey emerged, dressed in training garb as black as the hill, as his own robes. She had traded her usual three-bun hairstyle for a severe knot at the back of her head.  
  
She made her way up wordlessly, and came to a pause right in front of him.  
  
She dropped to one knee, head turned down.  
  
“Sorry I’m late, Master,” she said.  
  
Kylo tilted his head to the side, made a gesture that she should rise.  
  
As she did, her solemnity slipped. A cheeky smile emerged.  
  
“You’re fucking loving this, aren’t you?” she said.  
  
Behind the mask, Kylo had been chewing on his lower lip the entire time.  
  
“You have no idea,” he said.  
  
“Is this where I demonstrate the extent of my being sorry?” Rey asked, taking one step forward, expectation in her eyes.  
  
“Yes,” he said. “With a hundred push-ups. Followed by a hundred squats. And a hundred sit-ups.”  
  
Her face fell with the suddenness of a summer downpour. “Wait are—are you serious?”  
  
He nodded. “Also, a few laps up and down this hill.”  
  
She looked over her shoulder, seemed to appreciate only now just how tall and steep the hill was.  
  
“But this is just pretend,” she said. Pretending was a harmless pastime. A game. At least according to the rules.  
  
“It is,” Kylo said. “Pretending involves you doing a hundred push-ups, starting now.”  
  
He allowed a pause to hang in the air. “You’re right, a hundred is excessive. Maybe you can do…fifty?”  
  
“I can do a hundred,” she said testily, realizing as she did that she had now committed herself to the entirety of the exercise.  
  
“Fine,” she huffed, returning to the ground and beginning.  
  
Kylo knelt down next to her. Her form was perfect, muscles taut, shoulders set, the pumping of her arms machine-like. The shifting waters of her face swirled from irritation, to resolve, and then back to irritation.  
  
“I don’t need you looking over my shoulder, Master,” she muttered.  
  
He had not stopped grinning. “Too bad, Apprentice.”  
  
  
Luke Skywalker would have been proud. She did not complain aloud, even if the look she shot him, as she jogged up and down the hill, and dodged the Force-flung pebbles he attacked her with on her seventy-fifth lap, and in her first hour headstanding on the top of the hill, was an escalation of ‘ _the sex had better be really really good_.’  
  
“That’s enough,” he finally said, as she sidestepped the last of his lightsaber swipes.  
  
Rey had considerable stores of endurance, but it was not inexhaustible.  
  
“Is it?” she asked, legs trembling, hairs plastered to the sides of her face. Her training garb had turned a deeper shade of mud and sweat-lined black. “Sure you don’t want a piggy-back ride around the hills?”  
  
“One last thing,” Kylo said, leading the way to one of the standing stones.  
  
It was an ancient, wind-worn obelisk, like a commuter shuttle with its nose pointed up towards the sky. It had weathered storms, the landfall of settlers, and the slow shift of the tectonic plates beneath.  
  
“Use the Force to lift that up,” he said.  
  
She turned from him, to the obelisk, still gathering her breath. “That thing?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“That _whole_ thing?”  
  
“You don’t think you can do it?”  
  
She didn’t say it. But she took her time straightening up.  
  
It was one thing to use the Force to shove an opponent during a duel, or to call a lightsaber to hand (or, he considered, to manipulate many thin lines of chains at once—a thought that tingled, not in an unpleasant way). But this required a bestial amount of raw strength.  
  
She extended one hand towards the obelisk and he felt her power welling up, could almost taste it in the air, through his mask’s filters. Tension suffused her, from her fingers, up her arm, to the set of her jaw.  
  
She had a grip on the obelisk, he could see that. Old dust broke from the standing stone’s face, floating down in a fine cloud. But the soil rumbled, like it were refusing to give the obelisk up. Rey stepped forward, hand still up, her fingers coiling. It didn’t matter that this was all just a game. She saw the obstruction, wanted to move it, needed to move it.  
  
She couldn’t have exerted more effort than if she were trying to move the rock with her own two hands. But the minutes trickled by, and her power began to ebb, the soil stopped rumbling. She stooped down, hands on her knees.  
  
“I can’t,” she finally said.  
  
Her failure stung. Just as he thought it would.  
  
“Try something for me,” he said, drifting towards her shoulder. “You were drawing power from a place of tranquility, finding stillness in yourself, and using it to extend your will outwards.”  
  
He remembered precisely what that felt like, how proud he had been to be able to do it. “But there is another well from which you can draw power.”  
  
She already knew where he was going.  
  
“You want me to draw on the Dark Side,” she said flatly.  
  
“Let there be nothing but truth between us,” he said. “Yes, I want you to try it.”  
  
She folded her arms. “Ren—“  
  
“Hear me out,” he said, holding his hands up. “You already do it—I feel it when we fight. Your rage pours out from you.”  
  
He turned towards the obelisk. “Try it deliberately, just once. If anything, it will give you a better understanding of what the Jedi of old were trying to avoid.”  
  
She grimaced at that, turned back to the rock.  
  
“Your anger runs deep,” he said. “Feel it, like a current within you. Let it focus your will.”  
  
She hadn’t even raised her hand, but a different scent seemed to charge the air.  
  
“Anger,” she grimaced. “What has getting angry ever gotten me?”  
  
An edge was creeping into her tone, though he wasn’t sure she was even aware of it. “You know what anger is? I was a kid—I’d found the freighter during one of my salvages. Knew I could fix it up. It would take time, and I’d have to hoard supplies, but—think of all the portions I could get. That’s what I was thinking—not even that I could fix it and fly the fuck out of Jakku. No, I was going to wait right where I was, but I was going to get way more food portions for a working ship than a broken one.  
  
“Devi and Strunk found out about it. Said they’d help me for a cut of the portions,” there was a crack, like lightning on a dry day. It had come from the obelisk. Rey continued as though she hadn’t heard. “I knew it would be a fool thing to trust them. But I needed more supplies. And they were handy when the Teedos swarmed the freighter. A cut of the portions, I figured, sure, why not. They’d earned it…”  
  
The rumbling returned to the ground beneath their feet. “We brought the freighter to Niima Outpost together. The other scavengers—they even seemed happy for us. Biggest score anyone had seen in a while. And a year of my life spent repairing it. I’d even made a couple of friends—me. I went ahead to tell Unkar Plutt. And those two rats took the freighter and flew away.”  
  
Her fingers were digging into her arms. “I could have screamed at the sky, but would that have brought them back? They wouldn’t even have heard. No—screaming at the sky doesn’t get you anything—“  
  
The air was heavy with a thrumming that emanated squarely from Rey. Surprised at herself, she looked towards Kylo.  
  
“Use it,” he said, pointing at the obelisk. “Use it now.”  
  
Hesitating, she reached out with her hand again. There was a tremor, and the earth which had packed the base of the obelisk for thousands of years cracked open. So much of the obelisk had been buried. Now, stone that hadn’t seen the sun in millennia was being dragged into the light. Rock powder streamed down around the stone face, and for a moment Rey held it fully in the air, like a splint pulled from the planet’s skin.  
  
“That,” Kylo said. “That is the spear tip of your anguish.”  
  
He watched her face, at the pitched, disturbed confusion.  
  
“All your anger—all your _pain_ has a use,” he said, stepping towards her, the words arising heavily. “They give you power.”  
  
These were the teachings of the Sith lords, of the Supreme Leader, but the words were his own. He had whispered it to himself when he was alone, fending off dreams of the Jedi school.  
  
He placed himself before her, close enough to see sweat beading on the furrows of her brow. “I want you to know that you have suffered nothing in vain. What has hurt you only makes you stronger.”  
  
Elation rose briefly in her eyes, before something snuffed it out. She let her hand drop, and he heard the obelisk falling behind him, crumbling onto the hill with a quake that would have been felt for miles around.  
  
A deep quietude had come to Rey, as blackened earth dusted her cheek. “I’m tired,” she said.  
  
  
He had pitched the two-person tent in the shadow of one of the hills. He’d even brought in enough water to bathe in, and a small metal tub to put it all in. If she had asked how he’d gotten all that stuff out in the hinterlands, he would have told her that it had taken three days, a small amount of negotiation with a local moisture farmer, and about five minutes of bullying use of a speeder out of Mitaka.  
  
It had been meant as a surprise, at the end of a day of training. It had also been meant to be the starting point of what he’d figured would be a long night of an entirely different sort of teaching.  
  
But she did not ask. She sat in the tub in the same suspicious silence, broken only by the slosh of water when she shifted her legs.  
  
She hadn’t even looked at him, as they had gone back down the hill with the black cloud of dust the fallen obelisk had raised.  
  
Kylo watched her from the corner, feeling the grind and twist of her emotions. He could just as well have been on the other side of the galaxy.  
  
He had considered something like this might happen. Forbidden truths had that effect. But now that he had shown her what she was capable of, he wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it himself. He _should_ have been pleased. Instead, what he had was a growing gnawing, accompanied by the thought that she’d have to speak to him again, eventually.  
  
But as he made to remove his mask, her voice came from across the tent.  
  
“Don’t.”  
  
She was looking at him from over her shoulder, wet hair snaking around her shoulders. He recognized that look on her face.  
  
“Keep it on,” she said.  
  
He couldn’t keep the incredulity from his voice. “You want me? With the mask?”  
  
She rose from the tub. “Nothing but truth between us right?”  
  
There was a deliberate slowness to the way she walked to him, allowing him to watch the water steaming down her skin, the shine it granted to the swell of her breasts, the taut ridges of her belly.  
  
She stopped short of him, water dripping down in rivulets from her hair to his boots, and put a hand adorned in shining droplets at the base of his gorget. “Yes, my Master. With the mask.”  
  
This, he hadn't planned. But he was so hard he felt he could burst, tight heat fanning out across his chest.  
  
Just as he reached up to touch her shoulder, she drifted backwards, footprints dark on the floor. He caught a droplet of bath water on his glove, as she swept across the room, to the cot. It creaked underneath her.  
  
“I like to think of you sometimes, in the mask, when I play with myself.”  
  
She tilted her knee to the side so he could see the gleam between her legs. Despite himself, his hands were twitching.  
  
“In the shower usually,” she said. “Or on long flights, in my quarters. When I’m alone with my thoughts, I allow you to appear as you do now.”  
  
She wasn’t quite smiling, but her hand slipped down the inside of her thigh, fingertips burying themselves in her pubic hair. It had grown warm inside Kylo’s mask, the closed helmet seemed to amplify his breathing.  
  
“I imagine how you walk towards me, like you know what you’ve come to take, that you will not be denied. It used to frighten me to think of you that way, but at some point the feeling changed. It became thrilling. What would have made me run away before, became…”  
  
She spread the lips of her cunt with a pair of fingers, the wet pink of it beckoned.  
  
“…something far more interesting.”  
  
Kylo just realized that his hands were already moving, fumbling at his belt, at the front of his robes, as he took a heavy step towards the cot.  
  
“Sometimes I imagine we’re back in that interrogation room,” Rey said. She half-smiled at that. “Yes, strange, I know. I imagine you telling me you can take whatever you want, but you have no idea what I can _give_.”  
  
The cot cried out under the weight of Kylo’s knee. His dick was throbbing in his gloved hand.

“What would you give me?” he asked, voice tight through the voice modulator.  
  
“I’d throw the doors of my mind open to you, let you see how much I have wanted—how much—I have longed for—“  
  
He pushed her shoulders down onto the cot.

“—You,” she breathed, her legs on either side of his hips.  
  
Inside the mask, behind his garments, Kylo could feel the adrenaline surge reaching perilously close to a tipping point, strengthening under the strum of her words.  
  
“I can’t move against the restraints but I’m so wet,” her eyes briefly shut, like she was imagining it even now. “With the lightsaber…you slice through my clothes, I’d feel just the hot tip of it across my skin. And you’d take your fucking time—your gloves would be on my legs—like that—and your suit pressed up against me, tight, so when you hold me to you I…”  
  
There was a tautness to the muscles of her back, of her ass, speaking of all her exertions that afternoon. When he dug his fingers into them, her words began to break, but her brow furrowed and she made herself continue.  
  
“…It’s like I’m crushed up against you. When I look up, all I see is your mask—”  
  
Her eyes drifted upwards. He knew they met the dark visor, the gashed mouthguard, all the little nicks in the silver lining.  
  
“—Just like that,” she said quietly.  
  
He eased himself into her, and a wordless murmur escaped her lips.  
  
“Continue,” he said, feeling her tight around his dick. “My Apprentice.”  
  
“It’s all I see,” she said, her voice airy. “When you put yourself inside me. You’re so hard, so hot. Pushing inside, again and again—“  
  
She gasped. Her legs slipped around his back, feet hooking behind him. Her hands were on her knees, it’s like she was pulling him deeper into her.  
  
“We could be fighting in the glade again, just us, and—I’ve had enough of fighting—let’s just disappear into the shadows, you can take me against the stalks, rough enough to make the leaves fall—“  
  
Her words came more urgently as he rocked himself against her. “In the house, with that nice glass ceiling, I’ll suck your dick while you breathe through that fucking mask—“  
  
Harder now, seeing how long she could keep up her talk. He was biting down the urge to moan aloud, but it was building up in his chest, in his throat.  
  
“Or, outside. In the snow—you’ll say I need a teacher. I’ll say—yes. Teach me. What I need to learn. On my back, or on my knees, or with my ass in the air, I’ll take all your sweet tutelage. I’ll take it all… You’ll tell me to join you, there, in the Dark…”  
  
“Yes—“ he whispered. Behind her, the mattress was dark with bathwater, the legs of the cot screeching in protest, threatening to splinter.  
  
“The Darkness, I feel it,” her head fell back at the release of a long-held confession. “Constantly. Surrounding me, pressing against my skin. You’ll say, let it in, let it in, Apprentice, and I will, let it all the way inside—let it consume me—“  
  
The rush that had built up coiled around Kylo’s limbs. He needed to hear this—needed it—  
  
“And I want it to,” she whispered, her eyes bright. “Sometimes, I want it to, so bad. It would be—the easiest thing in the world. To just—give in—“  
  
Her hands went around his head, and with a sudden forcefulness she yanked his helmet down towards her.  
  
Inside the mask, a small undulation escaped Kylo’s throat. She was kissing the mask. Without seeing, he knew that her lips were parted on the mouthguard, her tongue tracing a line on the metal.  
  
The dam within him broke.  
  
He reared up and tore the mask off, the cold air biting his face. He flung the helmet aside and it landed on the other side of the tent.  
  
He dove down again, pushed his mouth against hers, hard enough to take the air from her lungs. They came that way, breathing in one another's cries, her nails raking against the leather of his suit, the heat of her gasps puffing down his neck.  
  
He drew away to see her eyes on his face, as though this were the first time she’d ever seen it.  
  
She reached up with her hand. He was familiar by now with the touch of her fingers on his face, knew the way they traced his eyebrows, his nose, the line of his chin. But right now, it was only one particular path her fingers visited - the scar left by a lightsaber strike she had dealt him what seemed like ages ago.  
  
Her voice was soft.  
  
“If I’d given in, I wouldn’t have gone for your face,” she said. “I would have gone for your throat.”  
  
She followed the line across his face, over and over again, gently.  
  
“You were on the ground, bleeding. You knew, as well as I did, that it would have been nothing at all to let the saber fall.”  
  
Her fingers came to a stop at his cheek. “How many times have I almost killed you, Kylo Ren?”  
  
He kept perfectly still, somehow entirely certain that he was the one who’d been mastered.  
  
“It’s not just for _my_ sake that I have to resist the Dark,” she said. Her eyes spoke of a tiredness that had nothing to do with the day’s exertions - the longer he stared, trying to trace the source of that tiredness, the deeper he seemed to fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Push-ups are hard, guys.
> 
> Also, the Devi and Strunk story comes from Before the Awakening, which I have not read, but Wookieepedia'd as part of researching Rey. When I started writing this trilogy, I thought Rey was Cool And All, but had a far greater affection for Kylo Ren. But since Finding Out As Much As I Can About Rey, my appreciation for her has grown exponentially. Like if Reylo becomes canon in the movies, but comes in a way that is out of character for her, I won't buy it.
> 
> Aaaand we're past the halfway point of the story (!). Some Stuff needs to happen, so the upcoming chapters are stretching out a bit longer than I thought they would (so good thing, more story; bad thing, more time needed to write. WHOO). 
> 
> Next update will be Wednesday. I guess you can call it an adventure story (shrug :D).


	9. On involvement

ORACIONE 7  
Giga-class transport  
Lothal system  
  
  
Sur waddled down the hallways as quickly as his legs could take him, comms in one hand, vibrosword in the other. Overhead, the emergency lights washed the walls in red. The hallway shuddered - another explosion. A herd of panicked Ithorians ran past him from the opposite direction—“Stay calm!” he wheezed, “Head to the life pods—“ and not a one of them even glanced down at him as they passed.  
  
Another explosion nearly knocked him to his knees as his comms buzzed to life. “ _Sur—deck 7 clear?_ ”  
  
“Deck 7 clear,” he grunted, but then the sanitation closet in the corner opened and a human male stepped out—on the tall side for his species, prominent nose, messy dark hair, and an angry scar across his face.   
  
“No wait,” Sur groaned. “Another kriffing passenger, I’ll clear him out.”  
  
Sur tottered over to him, prepared as an official representative of the Floating Hotel and Buffet Bar Oracione 7 to instruct him towards safety, but the man reared towards him, finger pointed down at his snout.  
  
“You.” He was bossy, this one. “You will tell us what’s happening here.”  
  
Us?  
  
A human female emerged from the closet, pale skin, lithe build, simultaneously smoothing down her dishevelled hair and vigorously wiping at her mouth.   
  
Sur wasn’t an idiot, he knew what this was.  
  
“No good what you’re doing,” he said to them. “There’s no hiding from those kriffing pirates.”   
  
“Hiding?” The man’s face was remarkably calm. “Yes. We were hiding. From the pirates.”  
  
“What pirates?” the woman asked, zipping up the front of her vest.  
  
“The pirates who boarded us an hour ago! They been killing passengers, ransacking the stores—“ anger made Sur’s words disappear into a series of snorting Ugnaught curses in reference to mothers and body parts and old cheese. He could have gone on, but his comms buzzed again.  
  
“ _Deck 7 compromised—you hear me Sur?—Deck 7 is—_ “ there was a crackle and a high static whine, and the noise from the other end died.  
  
Sur’s blood ran cold.   
  
“Okay—“ he looked up towards the passengers—paid passengers of the vessel he had been pledged to since he was just growing into his tusks. His responsibility.   
  
“This is what we do,” he said. “The life pods are starboard. You two stay behind me. We’ll go sneaky-like, and if we run into any of the pirates—“ he brandished the vibrosword, which was almost as tall as he was. “You leave ‘em to me.”  
  
The male looked like something Sur had just said was personally offensive to him, but the woman smiled, got down on one knee so she could look Sur right in the face.  
  
“Look, Mister…Sur, right? My companion and I are used to dealing with um, pirates. So how about we take the lead and you follow us?”  
  
Sur bristled. “No can do ma’am, I can’t let it be said that Deckhand Bob Sur let passengers risk their lives in his line of duty—“  
  
“Do you even know how to use this thing?” the man asked. For some reason, the vibrosword had migrated from Sur’s hand to his without Sur noticing at all.  
  
The Ugnaught squealed. “How did you—when—“  
  
“Trust me,” the woman said, getting to her feet and turning back to the sanitation closet. “It’s better in his hands than yours.”  
  
“But—“  
  
She took a mop from the closet and kicked out the head, leaving her with the pole.  
  
The man leaned towards her, voice dropping, but he didn’t seem to know how good an Ugnaught’s hearing was. “Does he have to come with us?”  
  
“Why not?” she held up the mop handle, like she were testing its weight.  
  
“He’s going to hold us back.”  
  
“He’s coming with us.”  
  
“We have a rule against getting involved in other people’s problems—“  
  
She gave him a look that made the hairs at the back of Sur’s neck stand on end.   
  
“Fuck the rules,” she said. “We’re not leaving him.”  
  
And then she turned back to Sur, as though she hadn’t just looked at her companion like she could strangle him with a thought. “Now why don’t you show us the way to the life pods?”  
  
  
The man and the woman walked ahead. The man had an obnoxious habit of twirling the vibrosword in his grip.  
  
“What an ungainly thing,” he was saying. “Haven’t touched one of these since I was a youngling.”  
  
“There’s a thought,” the woman said, snickering.  
  
Sur wasn’t sure what the relationship between these two were. Humans were difficult to tell apart, so at first he was pretty sure they were kin. Brother and sister maybe. Or cousins. But there was something about how she spoke to him, like she were enjoying being able to talk to him a bit too much. And something about how he stole glances at her as they walked, like he were looking for her approval. Sur didn’t know. Thinking about it was making his head spin.   
  
They came to an abrupt halt, ducked behind a fleximetal crate.   
  
Just past was the Deck 7 main lobby, where a large group of pirates had begun stacking up boxes of loot. Dead Ithorians littered the floor, limbs splayed in pools of blood.  
  
Sur’s knees began to quiver. There were six—no, ten—no, twenty of them - hulking Gamorreans in black spike-studded armor, blasters at their shoulders and vibro-axes at their belts.  
  
The woman bent towards the man, “I’ll take left and you take right?”  
  
“If you want to sit this one out, I can actually take them all out,” he said.  
  
Before they could decide, a loud, pitchy battle cry emerged from the crate they were hiding behind.  
  
As one, the pirates turned in their direction.   
  
The crate burst open and a tiny figure, tinier than Sur, ran out towards the pirates, brandishing what looked like a shiv hewn from an old toothbrush. The figure struck the nearest Gamorrean in the knee, stabbing wildly, screaming in such uncurbed fury that even the pirates at the other end of the lobby came over to see what all the ruckus was about.  
  
The tiny figure didn’t seem to realize that its little shiv was doing nothing against the Gamorrean’s greaves. The pirate on the receiving end shrugged towards its companions, lips curling up over its fangs in a grin.  
  
“That’s Swabber Gid,” Sur said, in disbelief. “He’s going to get himself killed!”  
  
The pirate picked Swabber Gid up by the scruff of his collar, while the tiny figure continued to flail. He was a Kel Dor, eyes like watery beads, face mask not at all muffling his continued shrieking. He was probably seven years old.  
  
Another pirate had lifted up his blaster, business end pointed at Gid’s face, when the woman, who had just a moment ago been crouched right in front of Sur, was suddenly airborne, staff over her head.   
  
Afterwards, Sur wouldn’t be able to tell what happened, it was all so fast. The blaster had gone off, but it had hit another pirate square in the chest—the one holding the blaster was suddenly down, his helmet cracked in half—the pirate holding Gid was doubled over, eyes bulging in pain—and the woman was in the air again, twisting as she arced to catch a pair of Gamorreans with the blunt ends of her staff.  
  
Sur suddenly realized he was alone behind the crate. The man had simply walked into the fray, as though he had all the time in the world, pausing just to grab Gid off the floor and hurling him one-handed over the crate. Sur grunted as the boy landed in his arms.  
  
“Gid—“ The deckhand gripped the boy by the shoulders. “What the fuck were you thinking, hiding in that box?”  
  
“I weren’t hiding,” the boy said, his black eyes reflecting Sur’s quivering snout. “I were waiting to shank them.”  
  
“You little shit,” Sur said, but relief flooded his tone.  
  
Past the crate, a bloodbath was happening. The woman was like a kriffing typhoon, picked her way through the pirates, weaving in and out. But the man was a cold-eyed monster—walking up to one pirate and stabbing him in the chest, walking to the next pirate and stabbing him in the chest. He was leaving a trail of bodies behind.  
  
A wave of blaster fire erupted from behind the man. He spun about, side-stepped the volley, and Sur thought he saw a single blaster bolt suspended right in front of the man’s outstretched hand, hazy as a mirage, before the man stepped aside, and it continued down its vector right into another pirate’s skull. Sur immediately dismissed it though, because what the fuck, how did that even make sense.  
  
It took the humans about ten minutes to clear the lobby.  
  
“You _stupid_ boy,” the man’s voice echoed in the lobby as he stalked towards Gid. Sur had the instinct to throw himself between the man and the boy, but the little Kel Dor stood up defiantly.  
  
“What did you think you were _doing_?” the man pulled his voice low, into a simmering hiss, looming over Gid. “No strategy, no skill, no thought whatsoever.”  
  
“They was killing passengers,” the boy said, his hands balling into quivering fists. “So I was gunna kill them back.”  
  
“You were helpless,” the man said, sinking down to a knee, putting himself eye-to-eye with the boy. “Didn’t your parents tell you not to get into fights you can’t win?”  
  
“Doesn’t matter,” the boy said, the tentacle-like bulbs on either end of his face tensing in frustration. “They just left me here.”  
  
A strange look came upon the man’s face. Sur took it to be confusion, and so explained.  
  
“Gid’s an indentured serviceman, like me,” Sur said. “His family were driven out of their city when the First Order took over. Parents sold him to the Oracione because they couldn’t afford him no more.”  
  
The lines at the corners of the man’s mouth hardened. The woman had come up behind, her eyes sharp on both Sur and Gid, her grip on the staff tight.  
  
Another explosion rocked the lobby, sending loose panels on the ceiling crashing down. Electrical wires tore free, sending sparks flying over the bodies of the downed pirates.  
  
Sur looked up in alarm. “That sounded like the engine.”  
  
“Life pods,” the woman said.   
  
  
There was supposed to be a walkway connecting the lobby to the life pod bay, spanning a straight drop down to the sub-levels. There was about half the walkway left.  
  
Sur walked up to the edge. A wave of hot air was coming up from the chasm, making his cheek flaps flutter.  
  
“No kriffing way,” he said, turning back to the two humans and one Kel Dor. “I know you’re both Dathomirian witches or some shit, but you cannot make that jump.”  
  
He paused. “More importantly, neither Gid nor I can make that jump.”  
  
“Where do you get in life with a mentality like that,” the man muttered, arms crossed.  
  
The woman had not stopped scanning the distance between the edge of the broken walkway, and the corridor beyond. She walked back a few paces, and without another word to any of them, dashed up to the edge and leaped.   
  
It was impossible, as Sur had said. He had known enough humans to know that they could not have had the leg power to reach that far. But something kept the human woman in the air, gliding almost, before she angled down, landed hard at the far end, rolled with the impact.  
  
She stood up and gave everyone on the other end a smile.  
  
“Your turn, Mister Sur!”  
  
Sur began backing away, stubby fingers up. “No—“ he had a very clear vision of what he’d look like pancaked a hundred hundred meters below.   
  
But he had backed up against the man’s legs. As he turned up at the man’s face, it occurred to him that those were the eyes of someone who had killed very many people before.  
  
“You can jump, or you can be thrown,” he said, voice somehow carrying over the increasing rumbling that went through the entire deck.  
  
“I promise, you won’t fall,” the woman yelled. “Also you might want to hurry.”  
  
Sur took one last look at Gid, the Kel Dor's young face twisted in fear, and at the man, who was between boredom and impatience.   
  
Sur ran. It wasn’t as much a run as a very brisk waddle, feeling all those years guzzling passengers’ leftover beer in his gut. He was out of breath before he got to the edge, was wheezing as he jumped.  
  
The angle was wrong, the distance too great, he shut his eyes and screamed as he fell—he was—he wasn’t sure what was happening.   
  
He kept his eyes shut, but he could feel himself rolling through the air, his stomach somersaulting in protest. Distantly, he heard Gid crying out in shock. And then suddenly his knees were against floor. Head spinning, he opened his eyes, saw the woman grinning beside him.  
  
“That was great,” she said, helping him up. “Great jump, you should’ve seen it.”  
  
The words had barely left her mouth when another explosion rang out from deep within the ship.  
  
Metal screamed and crumbled, and he and the woman spun around in time to see the rest of the walkway giving way. The man and Gid ran back from the splintering edge, ending up almost a quarter of the length back towards the far side.  
  
This was the first time Sur had seen anything like concern on the woman’s face.   
  
She yelled a name out over the clatter of the walkway smashing down into the depths. It sounded like ‘Ben’, or ‘Ren’, or ‘Sven’, Sur wasn’t sure.  
  
The human and Gid were tiny figures at the other end of the drop.  
  
The man jabbed his finger across the chasm, like he were commanding Gid to leap, but the boy shook his head wildly, and Sur could imagine the panicked ‘no no no’ that accompanied it.  
  
“Just grab him and jump!” the woman yelled, as another explosion sent tempersteel pillars cracking through the walls like outstretched fingers.  
  
Across the fall, the man gave the woman an exasperated look. But he finally condescended to bend down ever so slightly, and the Kel Dor scampered up him like a tree, locking his arms around the man’s neck.  
  
The man was saying something to him, but the boy’s face was buried in the man’s shoulder. Gid was trembling, probably crying. The man jumped without hesitation.  
  
He landed on a jutting segment of pillar through the wall, bounding off as it cracked beneath his boots, leaping onto the next one, and the next—but another massive rumbling had loosened the one his feet connected with. There was a split-second of surprise on the man’s face as the pillar gave way, debris from high above falling around him.  
  
Sur fell to his knees, jamming his fingers into his mouth—they were going to _die_ —but the woman stepped forward, focused, like she were calculating the next move along with him.  
  
A large piece of gray slate tumbled into the gap from above. It might have once been part of the floor or ceiling of one of the upper decks. The man made an impossible leap towards it, Gid still plastered to his chest, one, two, steps across the falling piece of wall, scaling the tip of it, arm out towards the woman, whose arm was out towards him.  
  
They were too far apart to actually touch, but Sur got the distinct feeling that somehow, they had, they had reached one another, because the woman suddenly made as though she were yanking, and the man and Gid were tumbling over the edge of the walkway.  
  
Gid cried out, laughed, cried out again.  
  
The man also seemed stunned. “That’s something I’ve not done before,” he said, looking up at the woman, almost smiling, and she almost smiled back.  
  
For a moment, Sur was certain that they’d start making out.  
  
But then she grasped the man by the shoulder, hauling him up, taking Gid into her arms, and then they were all running towards the life pod bay.  
  
  
The life pod bay was empty by the time they arrived, all but the very last pod launched out into space.  
  
At the sight of it, Sur slowed down, heaviness creeping into his chest.  
  
“What’s wrong?” the woman asked, at the control panel, already activating the pod. “Get in.”  
  
“Can’t,” he said. “That there’s a two-person pod.”  
  
The doors slid open showing a narrow two-seater. The runes lighting up in the console told them that the life support system was limited.  
  
“Right,” Gid said softly, his pitch black eyes like glass.   
  
“That’s ridiculous,” the man said. “Get in the pod.”  
  
“No,” Sur said, looking up at the man and the woman with stony determination. “You got us this far, for that I’m grateful. But there’s no way I’m letting passengers stay behind while this place burns. Gid’s a kid, so he won’t take up that much space, or air—“  
  
“No,” Gid said. “Passengers disembark first. Them’s the rules.”  
  
The man and the woman traded glances.  
  
“It’s fine,” Sur said. “Always knew I’d die on this old wreck. But I had a few good years.”  
  
“Me too,” Gid said sagely.  
  
The woman crossed her arms. “You’re very brave, do you know that? Both of you. And I’ve known a few brave people.”  
  
That made Sur rub the tips of his tusks in embarrassment. Gid straightened up beside him.  
  
“Right,” Sur said, feeling the weight of years upon him. “All that’s left for me to do is to thank you for choosing the Oracione 7 as your transport for today, and wish that the rest of your journey goes well.”  
  
The woman bent down towards Sur. “Thank you Mister Sur and Mister Gid,” she said. “I will never forget you two.”  
  
Then she made a vague gesture with her hands. “Now both of you will get into the life pod.”  
  
Sur blinked, feeling like someone had touched him at the back of his brain with an ice cold finger. Of course he was going to go into the life pod. He heard himself saying it, found himself climbing into the pod, and Gid climbing in alongside him.  
  
“Very good,” the woman said. “Also…”  
  
She reached into her belt and pulled out a cloth purse. She pulled out a handful of credits and dumped them into Sur’s hands. Distantly, it occurred to Sur that that was more money than he could make in a year’s worth of work.  
  
“Consider yourselves un-indentured,” she said.   
  
“Here,” the man said, handing the vibrosword, still stained with the blood of the pirates, to Gid. “Learn how to use it.”  
  
Gid took the sword with trembling hands, eyes wide under the pierce of the man’s gaze. But Sur caught the woman suppressing a smile.  
  
“‘Learn how to use it?’” she asked the man.   
  
“You’re putting them on the run, he’ll have to defend himself.”  
  
She gave him a look, like she’d just caught him doing something he wouldn’t have wanted her to see, but in a good way.

“You continue to surprise me,” she said.  
  
He was avoiding her eyes. “Don’t start.”  
  
As the humans stepped back, and the console began to initiate life pod expulsion, Sur emerged as though from a daydream.  
  
“Wait! How are you getting out?”  
  
The man shrugged. “The pirates have a ship, we’ll go hijack it.”  
  
The doors were sliding shut. The last Sur saw of the couple was them turning their backs on the door.  
  
“Why can't you always be on my side?” the woman was asking.  
  
Walking ahead, she didn’t notice, but Sur did, that the man’s face underwent a transformation - lighting up all at once, like a Life Day parade, but just as quickly darkening again.  
  
And then the doors sealed shut, and both Sur and Gid grunted against the g-force pushing them back into their seats as the pod ejected out into space.  
  
  
The Oracione 7 burned silently in the void. Hundreds of other life pods were sprinkled around the wreckage like pale moons.  
  
In the two-seater, Sur found himself looking down at the credits wadded up in his hands. There was definitely enough for a couple of tickets on any ferry on any line going anywhere in the galaxy.  
  
“What were they, boss?” Gid asked, staring at the vibrosword in awe. “Mandos? Kanjiklub? Jedi?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Sur said. “I’m just glad they were there.”  
  
They floated in silence for a while.   
  
And then Sur turned to Gid. “You know that’s my sword, right?”  
  
The boy gave the old Ugnaught what he supposed was a smile underneath that facemask.  
  
“Not anymore, boss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an example of a chapter that was meant to be about 2,000 words long, and just kinda spun out of control (was fun to write though, just because it’s a more unusual point of view :D).
> 
> Another example of such a chapter will be the upcoming one. Cept if this chapter was more on the ‘haha shenanigans’ end of the spectrum, the next one will be on the ‘haha shenanigans oh hey that got heavier than I meant it to’ end. Should be up by Monday (hopefully).


	10. On close calls

The proprietress had called it the “house special.” To Kylo, it looked like something that had been scraped off a wall anywhere along the underground city’s interminable tunnels. But Rey was polishing her plate off with a gusto that was mesmerizing to watch.  
  
“You have absolutely no standards in food,” he said. He had his hood down, and Rey had her scavenger’s lenses up on her head.  
  
“Who needs standards when you have food,” she shrugged. “You know how many days a scavenger can go without food?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“I lost count,” she said, shovelling another portion into her mouth and chewing defiantly.  
  
He grimaced. “It could be tainted. Or poisoned. That old woman might be trying to knock us out to steal our belongings.”  
  
Rey was unimpressed. “What is it with you and this place? You keep looking over your shoulder.”  
  
That was even though they were the only two customers in the little inn, although “inn” was a grand term for what was essentially a series of cavities eked into the cavern walls, with uncovered window holes looking back out into the crowded footpaths. It was the latest in what Kylo had found to be an ongoing theme - the gambling halls were fronts for spice dens, the uniformed constabulary all sported gang tattoos, and he had broken at least two different sets of fingers that had made a swipe at his wallet.  
  
Nothing, Kylo had decided, would make this hovel any more miserable.  
  
“Next time, I decide where we meet,” he said. “Somewhere bread and meat are distinguishable as such.”  
  
She grinned. “With the leafy foods. And the ocean foods. And the sweet foods.”  
  
Something suspiciously close to a smile lurked at the corner of his mouth. “And if I ever find who’d left you to starve on Jakku, I’ll impale them on my light—“  
  
She shot up so quickly it was purely by reflex that he went into a protective curl when she hurled them both to the floor. The chairs almost toppled down around them.  
  
The proprietress looked up from the counter in confusion, but with a sudden icy rush, Kylo realized what was happening.  
  
“Who did you see?” his voice had instinctively dropped.  
  
Next to him, she crept up towards the window hole beside their table, peering just over the edge.  
  
“Finn and Poe,” she whispered back. “Shit, they must be on one of their dates. But why now? Why here? Who would have a date in a shithole like this?”  
  
He gave her a look of incredulity. “I could ask you the same question.”  
  
“ _We’re_ supposed to be keeping a low profile,” she hissed. She took a glance out the window again and visibly paled. “They’re headed here.”  
  
The old proprietress had wandered over to where they were sprawled on the floor.  
  
“Lady Revan?” she turned to Rey. “Is there anything wrong?”  
  
“Nothing at all,” Rey said, smiling a wide, cracked smile, as she shouldered Kylo up to his feet and towards the back of the room. She made a vague waving gesture in front of the proprietress’ eyes. “Also, you will not tell your new customers that we’re hiding in the broom closet.”  
  
The woman’s eyes momentarily glazed over. “I will not tell my new customers you are hiding in the broom closet,” she mumbled.  
  
  
It was less a broom closet, more a sizeable crack in the stone wall with a wood panel door thrown over it. It smelled like vermin inside.  
  
Through the gaps in the panels, Kylo saw them enter the inn - the traitor stormtrooper and the Number One Pilot in the Resistance. Rey’s dear friends. He smirked.  
  
They had no way of hearing what they were saying, but Poe was leaning over the counter, chatting the proprietress up, while Finn hung behind, smiling along. Not once did the old woman’s eyes slip towards the wooden door at the back of the room.  
  
“This is bad,” Rey muttered, the lanterns from the outside casting stripes of light on her face.  
  
Her back was to him, arms braced against the threshold, while he had taken up every inch of available space behind her. He had the sudden urge to just grab her ass in this enclosed space, but thought better of it. She was _frazzled_.  
  
“If they find out, the whole Resistance finds out,” she said.  
  
And if the Resistance found out, the First Order spies among them would find out, Kylo thought.  
  
“No one will find out,” he said.  
  
“Better not,” she said, voice low. “I’m going to have no idea what to say to General Organa.”  
  
His guts lurched at that.  
  
Out on the counter, credits were passing hands. How these people were sustaining small talk to such an extent was completely beyond him.  
  
“If it’s such a problem,” Kylo said, leaning down towards Rey’s ear, “I could just, you know, kill them.”  
  
Through the gaps of light, her eyes shone like cold steel. “Don’t talk about murdering my friends when you’re on downtime.”  
  
Past the wooden slats, Finn had randomly turned to the side. He was staring at the table Rey and Kylo had just left, at the disarray of the chairs and plates. His eyes wandered to the wooden door.  
  
Kylo’s mind raced through the options. The traitor would go over to the door and open it, Rey would probably try the mind trick, a good chance that would work—didn’t Luke once say that stormtroopers were particularly susceptible to mind tricks?—but if it didn’t, Kylo could punch him in the face—just to knock him out—if it killed him, that was no longer Kylo’s fault—but that left the pilot to deal with, across the room, and all he’d need was to catch a glimpse of either of them—  
  
Poe called out to Finn, they were both apparently heading out again. Finn took one last glance at the leftover food before allowing Poe to steer him out the door.  
  
In the closet, Rey and Kylo together released their bated breath.  
  
There was no question about what to do next - among the first of the rules they had decided on was that at any risk of exposure, they had to abort. Their rented skiff was sitting a click away in the city’s spaceport. They had meant to stay in the city overnight, and absolutely nothing by way of sex had occurred yet, but now was the time to go.  
  
“We follow them,” Rey said, as they left the closet.  
  
“What?”  
  
She waved her hand in front of the proprietress’ face again, telling the old woman she was not to worry about anything at all, and have a nice day, but Rey’s face was set.  
  
“We need to know where they’re going.”  
  
Kylo tugged his hood back up, voice sharp underneath. “What we need to do is get out of here.”  
  
“What if we head to the skiff, and turns out they decided to detour to the spaceport too? What if they parked right next to us?” She pulled the goggles back down across her face. “We. Follow. Them.”  
  
Kylo’s lips went into a straight line. “Is that an order?”  
  
“It’s a perfectly reasonable request made in a kindly manner,” Rey said, her voice stony.  
  
“This is a terrible idea,” he muttered.  
  
“As we’ve established, this whole entire thing we have is kind of a terrible idea,” she muttered back.  
  
  
The two were not, it seemed, headed to the spaceport. Finn and Poe walked together down the winding footpaths, with Finn gesturing widely at the doorways and windows carved into the rock walls that stretched up on either side of the streets before disappearing into the darkness above, Poe interrupting only to point to a passing astromech, probably comparing it to his stupid ball droid.  
  
Rey and Kylo followed at a distance, blending along with the crowds, never too close to hear what they were saying, but never far enough to lose sight.  
  
“She’d ask how you are,” Rey suddenly said, turning towards him. There was no need to say who 'she' was.  
  
Their quarry had paused at a stand selling some strange, bloated versions of meilooruns, and Kylo had leaned into the shadow of another market stall.  
  
“I mean, if those two find out, and they tell her. The first thing she’d ask me is how you’re doing.”  
  
An image flickered in Kylo’s mind. It had been years ago, on Hosnian Prime, back when she was know as Senator Organa to the masses, Princess Leia to her colleagues. General Organa wouldn’t come around until later.  
  
She’d been in the middle of some kind of re-election campaign, her office flooded with fliers and posters for approval, and all manner of aides, lobbyists, and delegates bustling about. He had been standing at the door a full twenty minutes before she had finally seen him. She’d smiled so widely. “ _Ben! What are you doing, skulking out there, come in—everyone, meet my son—_ “  
  
He scoffed. “Her concern will be the corruption of a precious Jedi ally.”  
  
“I don’t even know how much of a Jedi I am,” Rey said with a shrug. “But, she does miss you.”  
  
They were now on the verge of breaching the boundary of a conversation that made him prickle just to be in the vicinity of.  
  
“She never says it out loud,” Rey said. He had the impression she was telling him something she’d wanted to for a while.  
  
“Whenever you or the Knights come up in the briefings, you wouldn’t be able to tell from her face that she cares at all,” she went on. “But I feel it. Sometimes it’s all I can feel from her.”  
  
Something seemed to close over Kylo’s chest, but he shoved the feeling aside. He scowled beneath the hood.  
  
“Focus on the targets,” he said, nodding towards the figures up the street.  
  
  
Finn and Poe meandered down an alley where the beggars didn’t cluster so thickly, and the mixed smells of food and garbage dissipated somewhat. They stopped at a little tea parlor. At least that’s what the sign above it said. A red-bearded human as wide as he was tall greeted Finn and Poe at the door, and bade them come inside.  
  
Kylo and Rey loitered at the corner of the street, outside the pool of a flickering street lamp. As Rey craned her neck, trying to see what was happening inside, Kylo found that the barbed squeeze had not left his chest.  
  
“Why would you even bring her up,” he said, a bite in his tone. He was far closer to losing his temper than not. “I don’t _need_ to know these things.”  
  
Her voice was light, but with a layer of carbon steel in it.  
  
“I told you because you wanted to know,” she said. “You _wanted_ to.”  
  
The churn within him threatened to overflow, but he was caught on the stillness of her, standing close enough for him to see her eyes through the tempered glass.  
  
“Did I?” he asked like he was leveling a challenge. “Did you peer into my thoughts when I wasn’t paying attention?”  
  
He had seen First Order veterans tremble at that tone of voice, but she batted it aside like she’d parry a strike from his lightsaber.  
  
“I don’t need to see into your head to know you miss your mother,” she said. Her voice softened. “It’s natural, isn’t it?”  
  
It was he who looked away. He never thought he’d be grateful to have to be spying on a couple of Resistance slags as an excuse to stop speaking.  
  
  
They were at the street corner for a few more minutes, watching through the window into the little tea parlor. The red-bearded man had brought out drinks.  
  
“Looks like they’ll be there for a while,” Rey said. “We should be able to make it back to the skiff without anyone noticing.”  
  
“Finally.”  
  
She did seem to regret dragging them all the way there. “If we make it back early, maybe there’ll be time for other things,” she said.  
  
“There is no ‘maybe’ on that,” he said flatly. “Unless all we came to this place for was to have bad food and stalk your allies.”  
  
“I’ll make it worth your while.”  
  
That, he could live with.  
  
But as she drifted past his shoulder, he chanced to see—in the window of the tea parlor—  
  
She was already a few steps ahead. All he had to do was turn his back on the alley and walk. Whatever befell those two was nothing to _him_ —  
  
He whispered her name. She heard it over the bustle of the street, the warning in it, and suddenly she was spinning around, seeing as he did that through the window, Poe was slumped back on his seat at an unnatural angle, head lolled down, eyes shut. Finn had disappeared from view entirely.  
  
Something like a low note played discordant on a string instrument reverberated through the Force - something was terribly wrong.  
  
Rey charged so quickly down the alley it made the beggars look up, and before Kylo could stop her (assess the situation, he would have said, but her mind was already lost to screaming alarums), she kicked the door down.  
  
The tea parlor was empty except for the two. In the chair by the window, Poe’s chin was on his chest, as though he’d been struck unconscious. Finn was face-down on the table, his cup slipping from his fingers, rolling off the table and shattering on the floor. The liquid that spilled out looked enough like tea. There was no sign of the red-bearded man.  
  
Rey rushed to them, calling their names, checking pulses. They were unresponsive. She yanked down her glasses, and Kylo saw her eyes widened in barely-controlled agitation.  
  
“They’re breathing,” she said. “But why—what’s happening—“  
  
Kylo eyed the tea trickling in between the floor tiles and his own words flashed in his mind— _it could be tainted. Or poisoned_.  
  
But if the red-bearded man had simply meant to rob them, why wasn’t he rifling through their pockets right now?  
  
As though on cue, a door into a backroom opened and the red-bearded man returned, whistling a merry tune, like it were any other day at work. In his hands were long lengths of chain.  
  
He stopped cold at the doorway, seeing Rey and Kylo, the tune dying on his lips. But before he could bolt backwards, Rey had raised her hand.  
  
The man was dragged forward, the chains dropping from his hands, skidding on his toes til he came to a stop right before Rey’s outstretched hand. The red-bearded man was finding that he couldn’t quite move his arms or legs, and he could not, try as he might, turn away from the livid woman in front of him.  
  
“I didn’t know they had company!” he blurted out. “Just take them and leave!”  
  
“What were you going to do to them?” Rey asked. Her tone was remarkably calm, but the fingers of her hand were twitching. “Tell me.”  
  
“Nothing!” The man said, fear all over his face. He briefly turned towards Kylo. “Really, I swear by the Mother of Moons, it was just—bad tea.”  
  
Kylo returned the frightened plea in the man’s face with serene silence.  
  
Rey didn’t even move, but Kylo felt a shift in the air, like it were a fabric suddenly pulled taut at a single point. The point was right at the red-bearded man’s head.  
  
Rey rummaged through his mind like it were a chest of junk, taking pieces and throwing them over her shoulder when it wasn’t what she was looking for. It was causing the red-bearded man a certain amount of pain, but none of his cries left his throat.  
  
Kylo reached outward with his mind as well, looking into the man’s thoughts over Rey’s shoulder.  
  
The tea shop was empty most of the time—bad rumors surrounded it. Neighbors told their children to stay away. But tourists had no way of knowing. They came in ones or twos, looking for cheap tea, and the red-bearded man was affable enough. Down the backroom stairs was a keg of Effrikim  extract, a powerful sedative - enough to knock a full-grown human out for a few hours. Further back were the cages, but no one ever stayed in them for long. They were beside the long-range communicator the red-bearded man used to contact his clients.  
  
Rey’s lips curled in disgust. “You’re a slaver,” she said. “For the Hutts.”  
  
The red-bearded man would have coiled away from her if he could. Sweat beaded at his brow. “No—I’m—“  
  
“You wait for strangers to pass by,” Rey said, like she were reading it off a list. “You knock them out. And you sell them.”  
  
“I’m—“ the man tried to manage a shrug. “It’s just business—the Niktos do it, the Hutts do it, even those assholes from the First Order do it—It’s never anyone who’ll be missed—“  
  
His last few words disappeared into a throaty squeak.  
  
“ _Never anyone who’ll be missed?_ Those are my _friends_ —” Rey’s voice was trembling. “You were going to—you were going to abduct them—“  
  
Beside her, Kylo felt her anger ripping through the Force, like lightning forking across the sky. The red-bearded man seemed to sense it as well, but his blubbering gave way to tight gagging. He couldn’t breathe.  
  
“You would have sold them like—like produce—“ Rey struggled with the words. The tips of her fingers had curled, almost into a claw. “Why would you do such a thing—“  
  
Kylo could feel the Darkness welling up from her in waves, charging the air where she stood. Her fingers began to close, and the man’s throat along with it.  
  
“You—“ her voice was barely a whisper, but in her mind, Kylo heard a chattering that grew and grew. _Kill him. Kill him. Kill him_.  
  
She wanted to, so much—  
  
Kylo stepped behind the man, ignited lightsaber in hand, and plunged the red blade into his back.  
  
Shocked, Rey dropped her hold on him entirely. The red-bearded man made a final gurgling noise, the livid blade of Kylo’s lightsaber crackling through his chest. He dropped to his knees, and Kylo switched the lightsaber off.  
  
  
It said something about the city that no one batted an eye at the sight of Rey and Kylo bringing two unconscious people with them back up the street.  
  
The old proprietress looked up as they entered. “Kriff! What happened to them?”  
  
“Oh—they’re drunk,” Rey couldn’t quite muster a smile. “So very drunk. We just found them outside.”  
  
Rey gently set Finn down on one of the nearby tables, while Kylo deposited Poe on the floor like a piece of luggage.  
  
“Will you take care of them?” Rey asked. “Here—“ she scooped a handful of credits from her pocket and left them on the counter. “For your trouble.”  
  
The proprietress turned from the two unconscious men to Rey and Kylo. “Friends of yours?” she asked.  
  
Another handful of credits appeared on the counter, this time from Kylo. “Nope,” he said.  
  
The old proprietress considered them both, the lines around her eyes deepening. “Well,” she said, sweeping the money away, “It’s unusual to be able to depend on the kindness of strangers in a city like this, but looks like my poor customers got really, really lucky.”  
  
  
Out in the street, their packs on their backs, Rey and Kylo made the long trek back to the landing grounds.  
  
The dark cloud continued to hang over Rey’s head as they passed by lamps that burned whether it was day or night, streets that continued to throng with sentients no matter what time it was.  
  
“Are you still up for it?” she asked.  
  
“For what?”  
  
“Fucking.”  
  
Surprised, he took a glance out the corner of his hood. She wasn’t even looking at him.  
  
“I would have thought you wouldn’t really be in the mood anymore.”  
  
“You thought wrong,” she said. “I need you.”  
  
There was nothing in her tone or in the way she walked that suggested anything was wrong, or indeed that anything of import was on her mind at all. But the tendrils of her rage seemed to lash sharply in the air overhead.  
  
“As you wish,” he said.  
  
  
He thought he’d known all the ways, all the styles of her ministrations. He’d known her to give and take, to oscillate between degrees of tenderness, to play him like a virtuoso on a valachord. This was entirely different.  
  
She sat astride him, in the skiff’s pilot seat, her hands clutching the headrest as she bobbed up and down on his lap. Their clothes were in a series of tangled piles that stretched all the way back to the door. The lights remained off.  
  
He leaned back, breath coming in tightening gasps, his brow moist. It seemed that all she needed him to do was to keep from coming for as long as humanly possible. Against the mechanical rhythm of her ass slapping against his thighs, the grip of her cunt, it was, even with all his powers of concentration, a losing battle.  
  
She barely made a noise, breathing sharp through clenched teeth. Her eyes were distant, lost in the fog created when the heat of rage had finally begun to sublimate into something else, but continued to char. She drove down, deeper, sending him up an arc of sensation he reached the tip of with a tremulous murmur. Faintly, he tried to right himself in the seat, against the continual pound of her hips, but the ball of his hand slipped on the little lever at the side of the pilot seat and with a rough metal clank, the back of the seat dropped back into full recline.  
  
Suddenly he was looking right up at her. Surprise briefly flickered on her face, but then she went right back to it, sinuously grinding the entirety of her weight against him. Her hair tickled his neck, her exhalations warm against his chin. Over and over she fell against him like waves pummeling the shore, and he allowed her to wash over him until he couldn’t take it anymore.  
  
He released a low grunt, fingers digging into her hips, and she finally ceased, wordlessly sinking against him, her face on his chest.  
  
The silence laid thickly. Lights from a passing speeder swept over the cockpit, over her back, his face, and the dark ceiling above.  
  
When she spoke, he could feel her breath against his collar.  
  
“I wanted him to suffer.”  
  
“You did.”  
  
She propped her chin up, so he could see sweat-slicked strands of hair across her face.  
  
“Why did you kill him?” she asked. “You didn’t think I could do it?”  
  
“I knew you could,” he said. There was no doubt about that. “But he was unarmed, and afraid. You would have regretted killing him.”  
  
For a moment, he thought she’d deny it. But instead she turned her eyes down.  
  
“He wasn’t even a soldier or anything,” she muttered. “He wasn’t doing what he did because he believed in a greater cause, it was just—business—“  
  
She grew quiet for a while, returned to pressing her face down on his shoulder.  
  
“I wanted him to know what he would have done,” she mumbled. “What he would have taken from me.”  
  
He blinked and her thoughts sprang into his mind. He saw a desert that stretched as far as the eye could see, watched as she had watched by herself the endless cycle of sun and moon—the other scavengers barely counted, everyone only ever looked out for themselves here—she didn’t care, she needed no one—but then, faces.  
  
That stupid ball droid. The traitor. The pilot. Faces Kylo didn’t know, but he recognized Resistance-issue jumpsuits and uniforms. That wrinkled old pirate, Maz Kanata. And—Kylo flinched—Han Solo, that weathered mug, the blade-sharpness in his eyes. The wookie, never far behind. Old Skywalker, drawing down his hood to take a good look at her. Leia Organa—Kylo felt his chest tighten again ( _you miss your mother_ ). And—was that him?  
  
She had a terrific memory of his face. There she was running her fingers along the line of his cheeks—he was on top of her, face drawn in want—beside her, trudging up a dirt path overlooking the ocean—zipping by her, down a starship’s laser-fire strewn corridor. He sat across her, pushing the plate of mulch across the table. _You have absolutely no standards in food._  
  
She felt like she held them all in her hands, but they were as dry sand, threatening to trickle away between her fingers. It was too easy to lose them. Try as she might, they’d slip away. And she—  
  
She couldn’t stand being alone again.  
  
He gazed down at her. She was perfectly still on top of him, but her shoulders were drawn up and her arms were taut on either side of his head, the leather of the headrest creaking under her fingers. Her breathing was unsteady, like she were using all the power she had to keep from losing control.  
  
He didn’t know what to do. What did people usually do in situations like this?  
  
His mind returned to Hosnian Prime, that same day he had stood outside his mother’s door while her political team had fluttered about. Except the sun had set, and the room was empty, save for the two of them. He was on one of the seats in front of her desk, head bent down, his elbows on his knees. “ _I don’t want to go with Uncle Luke—don’t send me away—I’m sorry—_ “ She had been standing at his shoulder, face carefully averted so she didn’t see his tears, but her hand was on his head, stroking back his hair. “ _Ben, it’s alright—_ “ she had said it again and again.  
  
He lifted up one hand, hesitated.  
  
With the care one might use to approach a rabid Loth-cat, he put his hand on the back of her head, slipped his fingers into her hair.  
  
“Rey—“ he said softly.  
  
It was only now that he noticed how long her hair had gotten. The strands slipped over and under the callouses on his knuckles.  
  
“It’s alright,” he said.  
  
She shifted, face still turned away. But she didn’t tell him to stop, so he continued.  
  
He followed the rush of her hair down the base of her neck, to her shoulders.  
  
“It’s alright,” he said again, and it hardly seemed to matter if that was actually true, if she believed him or not, because her breathing began to ease, and he felt her relaxing against him.  
  
The rage which had smouldered beneath her skin began to ebb. A part of him felt a pang - if there had been any time to convince her to embrace her anger, this had been it. It wouldn’t even have been difficult. Instead, he was stroking her hair, whispering to her like a mantra, until the storm of her thoughts had dissipated into the quiet of the skiff.  
  
She had already drifted asleep, why was he still stroking her hair?  
  
He went down the trail one last time, letting the palm of his hand rest between her shoulders, listening to her breathe. Only then did he lean back on the seat, closing his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this has been the most grueling chapter to write thus far, in part because a whole bunch of things needed to happen, which all used to be entire separate chapters (ie. Kylo remembering Leia, Rey facing a temptation to the Dark Side unlike any she’s experienced before, fucking in a skiff, shenanigans over almost getting caught…). So if this chapter felt kinda patchy (shrug), I tried (weep).
> 
> Didn’t help that at the time this was being drafted, I was also reading Bloodline (people who have read it will be familiar with Bastatha :D), and felt a terrible need to include as many references to Leia as possible (most of which ended up getting cutting out, because, it wasn’t helping the story none). 
> 
> I have very strong Ben Solo and Leia Organa feelings (for the curious, you can check out my short fic ‘On the other hand’, which does not occur in this trilogy’s continuum).
> 
> Next chapter up by Friday.


	11. On getting really drunk

RING OF KAFRENE TRADING POST  
Grillby’s Cantina  
  
  
It had started innocuously enough. They were in a cantina, Rey said, so they should get a drink. Kylo had said something about inebriation causing carelessness, and while it was true that the Trading Post was awash shoulder-to-shoulder with sentients from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and it was easy enough to hide in plain sight, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t get spotted. Then Rey had called him a stodgy fussbucket, and he had grudgingly ordered a Corellian brandy.  
  
“Brandy huh?” She tipped a bottle of something green and smoking to her lips. “Aren’t we of refined taste.”  
  
He swirled the drink in its glass, raising an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”  
  
“Nothing,” she said quickly. “Just. Yeah, I suppose you wouldn’t be used to the meaner stuff.”  
  
He leaned across the table towards her. “You’re suggesting I don’t have the tolerance for whatever swill you’re drinking.”  
  
She leaned right back towards him. “I wasn’t. But now that you’ve insulted my beverage I’m going to assume it’s because you don’t.”  
  
He drained the brandy with slow, measured, deliberateness, before turning the empty glass over on the table.  
  
“Fine,” he said. “Anything you take, I’ll take.”  
  
She had grinned at the challenge, and at the hint, just at the corner of his mouth, in a place she had learned to look for it, of a smile.  
  
“I’ll have you know, Scavenger, that the first time I deigned to have a drink, it was ale from Kashyyyk. Brewed by the wookies, for their own consumption. I took it like water.”  
  
Rey narrowed her eyes. “That’s all very impressive, oh Master of the Knights of Ren. But do you know what Knockback Nectar is? That’s the single alcoholic drink they have in Jakku, distilled from the lichens, brewed in rusty fuel canisters. When water ran low—which was often—my choice was between Nectar and gasoline.”  
  
She had called the waiter over, and what followed over the next hour and a half was a line of bottles, mugs, carafes, and dainty little glasses with umbrellas in them.  
  
It didn’t occur to Rey that this could at all be a mistake. That was, until the last shot of tsiraki, burning sweet and sour inside her mouth, and landing like a lump of crumpled metal in her gut.  
  
The floor grew wobbly when she closed her eyes. She sat back, rigid in her seat, willing the outlines of the sentients who walked past to resolve into shapes she could recognize. Across from her, Kylo did not look at all drunk, but he was clutching the edge of the table like a man might grip the railing of a ship in a typhoon.  
  
“Have you ever heard the tragedy of Lord Plagueis the Wise?” he asked, yelling over the crowd, though Rey wasn’t sure why, the crowd at the cantina were actually quite subdued tonight.  
  
“Lord—what?”  
  
He bent towards her, elbow knocking over a bottle or two. In the next table, a pair of Twi’leks looked up in alarm.  
  
“He was a Sith Lord,” Kylo said, in what was probably the loudest whisper Rey had ever heard. “He was drinking with his apprentice—not knowing that his apprentice meant to kill him—at the point he got superbly wasted, his apprentice just—“ he made a sudden gesture that made Rey slam back against her seat, arm up automatically to defend, but no actual Force lightning appeared at his fingers.  
  
“Don’t the Sith Lords all kill each other anyway?” Rey asked. Her sudden motion had left somersaults in her belly.  
  
“They do—“ Kylo leaned back on his seat, chin turned up. “S’why the Knights have done away with all that… But Plagueis was a loss—they say he’d unlocked the secret to prevent people from dying.”  
  
“For whatever good that did him,” Rey said.  
  
He smirked at that. “There are things one learns from the Dark that is simply beyond what the Light offers.”  
  
“And yet the Jedi manage to not kill one another at the best of times,” Rey said.  
  
“Is that what you are now?” he suddenly asked. “A Jedi?”  
  
“I’m…something,” she shrugged. She was, as Master Luke had said, very close to reaching the point a padawan might face the Jedi Trials.  
  
“I don’t know if I am what they were,” she said. “Sometimes I try opening Revan’s holocron—“ One of the two artefacts they had found during their time in that Island. “—because whatever he was, he wasn’t quite Jedi or Sith. Or maybe he was both. I’d like to learn more, but—“ she made a gesture like she were trying to pry open a box that wouldn’t yield.  
  
“It’s the same with Bastila’s holocron,” Kylo said. “Sometimes I can open it, sometimes I can’t. Which is—frustrating.”  
  
Silence settled between them. The trouble with having conversations about the Force was that it would likely end in both of them using what they’d learned against each other next time they had to fight.  
  
Rey changed the subject.  
  
“This,” she gestured towards the latest mug of strangely-colored drink the waiter had brought up. It looked and smelled like Rancor blood. “This is pretty close to the stuff back on Jakku.”  
  
“You present an interesting picture of your life on that backwater planet,” Kylo said. “Scavenging. Sandstorms. Drinking strange drinks.”  
  
“It wasn’t all like that,” she laughed. “There was—well,” she shrugged, embarrassed. “There was this thing I used to do, as a kid. Don’t laugh.”  
  
He leaned his chin on his knuckles, deeply curious.  
  
“I didn’t have friends, so I sort of made one up,” Rey said, taking a sip of the deep red brew. It sent a kick through her legs that ended in tingles at her toes.  
  
“I dug up this old helmet which the ident said belonged to an X-wing pilot by the name of Captain Dosmit Raeh.”  
  
This was a story, Rey considered, that she hadn’t actually told anyone else before, but she settled into it like one might into a familiar pair of socks.  
  
“I imagined Captain Raeh and I would like, go on adventures. Climb the sand dunes, crawl into the ruins, rescue other fallen Rebel pilots,” Rey laughed. “I was like her little assistant. I even made this rag doll of her.”  
  
She imagined it was because he was drunk that he had leaned forward on his elbow, staring at her like he’d never quite seen anything like her.  
  
“I grew out of it eventually,” she said. “Now that I think of it, it feels like I grew out of Jakku entirely.”  
  
“That wasteland,” he said, “Did not deserve you.”  
  
He took a swallow of the stuff in the mug, looked momentarily like he’d choke on it, but forced it down.  
  
“I suppose everyone grows out of where they came from eventually,” Rey said, shrugging.  
  
“If one ever grew into it to begin with,” Kylo said. He paused, brows furrowed, like he were trying to find the words for something he’d never put into words before either. “I spent a lot of time waiting. For—“  
  
_My mother and father._  
  
“But there was always something. Some political accord that had to be made. Some planet to rescue.” He looked down at his mug. “I was having nightmares. I’d realize later they were visions of the past, or future. Or aftershocks from accidentally peering into someone’s mind. I knew it was the Force, I wasn’t stupid.”  
  
“But I kept it from them for a long time,” his voice grew distant. “They had their important things to do, so I had to deal with whatever was happening to myself. I had to. I couldn’t be their _son_ if I wasn’t as strong as they were.”  
  
“Even when it became apparent that there would always be something more important than me—something to rush off to—I understood. I knew they cared for me—“ _Very much_. “But I understood that the heart must be buried in the pursuit of a greater cause. I found my cause eventually. And so I buried my heart.”  
  
Even as he sat across her, Rey could feel him through the Force. He left a volatile trembling in the fabric of the Force, one she had begun thinking of as a vast ocean, with an ebb and flow, never still—not for a moment—always pooling and churning.  
  
As he glared into his mug, it rose up in waves. But she had learned to swim in this particular ocean, knew when to dive and when to rise, and now she felt she’d broken surface to find the moon above.  
  
“You must have felt…” _Alone? Lonely?_ “…left behind.”  
  
He ran a finger around the lip of his mug. “You’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”  
  
An image came to Rey’s mind, of the shore where the ocean met a desert so vast it spilled into the horizon.  
  
“It’s not the best feeling,” she said.  
  
“I suffer nothing in vain.” Well-trod words. “What wounds me gives me power.”  
  
“I know. But doesn’t it get tiring? Just drawing on your pain all the time?”  
  
“I do what needs to be done.” He’d made to say that with confidence, but he seemed deflated somehow.  
  
“There are other ways to do what needs to be done,” Rey said. She felt a sudden flash of anger, not at all dulled by the booze. It wasn’t towards him. “Whoever told you there was only one way lied to you.”  
  
He didn’t respond to that. But she saw the minuscule shift in his features, the crack where doubt had planted a seed.  
  
At the same time, the last bottle arrived at their table.  
  
“Strongest thing we’ve got,” the waiter said. “Pamarthean Port In A Storm.” He dropped the bottle in their midst like it were a stinging insect. “Best of luck,” he said.  
  
Rey looked to Kylo, and Kylo looked to Rey.  
  
“If this defeats you,” Kylo said, “Next time we fuck, I get to come on your face.”  
  
She cracked a smile. “Fine. Just—don’t get it in my eye like last time—“  
  
“That was unintentional—“  
  
“But if this defeats you…” she stroked her jaw. “What will I make you do?”  
  
“Go ahead, dig deep into your strangest desires.” A wild look was coming to his face, that wasn’t entirely unattractive. “There is nothing you can think of that I will not _gladly_ do to your body, or let you do to mine.”  
  
On the next table, some of the patrons had begun nervously shifting as far away as they could from the pair of them.  
  
“Then,” Rey’s eyes grew bright. “I want you to do that thing.”  
  
“What thing?” Understanding dawned. “No.”  
  
“Come on! I did that other thing for you—“  
  
“Yes, but that was—“ he shrugged. “That was different.”  
  
“Different how?”  
  
“You were never really my apprentice,” he said.  
  
“And yet,” Rey said, “It managed to be an educational experience.”  
  
His eyes widened at that, and she shoved another glass towards him. The liquid inside seemed innocent enough, a couple of inches of blue-tinged water.  
  
“If I win, you will do that thing.” Rey averted her gaze. “Anyway, I’d have to win first, what are the chances of that?”  
  
“True,” he said, taking the glass, falling headlong into her trap.  
  
Port In A Storm—she’d heard the name whispered in varying amounts of fear and awe among the pilots in the Resistance. Pilot Greer, in particular, enjoyed telling new recruits how it burned in one’s innards, like fireworks during Foundation Day.  
  
White heat shot down Rey’s throat, to the pit of her stomach and up again, and for a moment the room was just a bit brighter, the noises disappearing behind the pounding of blood in her ears. She sank back in her seat, (“ _Kriff_ —“ she managed to say). She imagined this was what it would be like to swallow an ignited lightsaber. On the other hand, he made no sound at all.  
  
He didn’t quite fall forward. It was more of a controlled descent onto his elbows on the table, eyes swirling out of focus (and even then, she could see the refusal to concede), before his forehead dropped onto his arms. And Rey knew that this victory was hers.  
  
“Hah,” she said. And then immediately regretted it, just leaning forward made her feel like she would topple over.  
  
It was another full minute before she managed to stand, began to drag him up by his long black cloak (“Let’s go, you’re super drunk”), by his sleeve and collar, and he muttered odd strings of words (“no _you’re_ super drunk—“).  
  
Getting him up the stairs, to their room above, was a different sort of challenge.  
  
He was heavy, (“put your arm around my shoulder,” she said. “I can walk perfectly fine on my—“ A table had gotten knocked over. “Ren—“ she had breathed in exasperation).  
  
Halfway up the stairs he had demonstrated a sudden control of his limbs, pushing her back against the wall. “Rey,” he had said (strange, how after all this time it was still odd to hear her name on his lips, and he had said it like how one might ask for water after a week walking in the sand). He had leaned his dark head down, his mouth finding hers—fingertips tracing her thighs, as she returned the kiss.  
  
There was something familiar about this scenario - kissing him on the staircase of a cantina, but she couldn’t quite remember why, she was too engrossed in the warmth of his mouth. “Ren—“ she had whispered again. A different name had stood at the ready on her tongue, but she didn’t give it life. Not here, not now.  
  
But when he crumpled against her, fingers burying into her hair—sending tingles down her back as she remembered what it was like for him to stroke her hair—she had snorted back a laugh—“enough,” she had said—and she was trying to figure what she should call him.  
  
“Fool,” she finally breathed, right into his ear. He had responded by squeezing her left breast, and she had snickered, allowed his hand to find the place where her shirt gave way to skin, biting on her lip when his thumb began pressing down on her nipple in circles. Until a passing Sullustan making his way up the stairs made a very loud noise in disparagement.  
  
Their room was a tiny space with a bed under a window. She heaved him onto the mattress where he took up most of the space, arms and legs spread.  
  
“Fool,” she had whispered again, this time to herself.  
  
He was on his belly, face turned to the side on the pillow, not quite snoring, but breathing deep and regular. She’d slept beside that noise before. Now, she stood by the door, leaning against the threshold, watching. How different he looked, not stalking towards her with a lightsaber, not even approaching her with the intent of fucking her til lights appeared behind her eyes. Just—asleep.  
  
She leaned her head against the doorway, the alcohol fug still thick in her mind.  
  
“Ben,” she told his sleeping form. “Your name is Ben.”  
  
As she said it, a single thought tore through the haze of her mind, clear as a blaster bolt hitting home.  
  
Something caught in her throat. Her breathing quickened, her blood rushing. Rey was suddenly standing rigid, sweat fresh on her palms, the alcohol rush eddying away, making room for a painful blossoming of warmth.  
  
_Since when had she…?_ When had this taken root inside her, when had it spread? How had she never known—no. No, she had. The truth of it had always sat within her, although she’d deliberately kept her back to it, out of fear of what she’d see if she were to look over her shoulder. It had waited patiently, digging deep, outside her notice.  
  
Now—there was no way she couldn’t see it. And it made her press against the doorway, one hand over her mouth, watching the gentle rise and fall of his shoulders.  
  
The ocean was never still, right now it was almost peaceful, but Rey felt like she was drowning.  
  
Adrenaline kicked in. She knew what she had to do.  
  
Her belongings were in a stack next to his. Moving as quietly as she could, she snatched up her pack, her quarterstaff, throwing glances over her shoulder. His hair had fallen across his face.  
  
Pulse racing, Rey made for the door. _I have to_ , she thought. _I have to_.  
  
She had one foot out the threshold when something knocked onto the floor behind her. Reflexively, she looked back.  
  
He had shifted on the bed, arm slipping off the edge of the mattress, knuckles hitting the floor. He continued to sleep.  
  
Rey took one look out into the narrow corridor, towards the light of the stairway. And she turned back to where he laid.  
  
She told herself that it was just a courtesy, really. It would cost her nothing at all to slip back into the room and fix his arm. There—she gently lifted his hand off the floor and tucked it back alongside his ribs. He hadn’t even felt it at all. This close, she could see a thin line of drool down the corner of his lips, it seemed to glisten in the light from the half-opened door.  
  
He awoke a couple of hours later, to complete darkness.  
  
His voice came heavily. “Rey?”  
  
For a moment, nothing but silence.  
  
“Here,” she said, barely whispering, like he’d disturbed her from a dream.  
  
She was sitting on the floor right where his hand had fallen, her back leaning against the mattress. Her pack and staff were in a heap at her feet.  
  
“What’re you—there?” he mumbled. “Come to bed—“ But then his head sank to the pillow, and he was out cold again.  
  
Rey had to smile at that, but it was a wan smile. Her heart continued to pound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So update was a bit late this time, sorry for that. Ironically, it was because during the time I usually update, I was out getting drunk :). Also, all named alcoholic drinks in this chapter are actual Star Wars universe drinks ("Rancor Blood" being the most interesting).
> 
> The Captain Raeh story comes from Rey's Survival Guide. There's a theory that Rey forgot her real name after being dumped on Jakku, and picked up Captain Raeh's name for her own (dunno if I buy that though, she should've known her name at age 5, right?).
> 
> Next chapter will be up by Thursday (I'd written half of it already then decided to re-do it in a different POV. Ye'll see).


	12. On pretending II

TARIS  
City of Taris  
Habitation 8H41  
  
  
  
“Aren’t you done yet?” She couldn’t keep the eagerness from her voice. Or the impatience.  
  
Behind the folding partition came a noncommittal grunt.  
  
“I hate to hurry you, but I am on a schedule,” Rey said.  
  
Her communicator sat on the desk beside her. The Resistance had taken too many hits lately, it had been almost impossible to make the time to disappear for even just a day. Ackbar had made it clear that she could be called upon at any moment—to count on it. ‘Let her go,’ General Organa had said, over a glass of Corellian brandy. ‘A girl needs to blow off some steam before the big fighting starts, doesn’t she?’ _More than you know_ , Rey had wanted to say.  
  
From behind the partition came the fluttering of cloth.  
  
“Does it all fit okay?” Rey asked.  
  
“…Yes.”  
  
Kylo didn’t like it. She hadn’t expected him to. But then, she’d won the drinking contest (not the first time she’d had something to thank her iron stomach for). That had been months ago, but still, this was her prize. Rules were rules.  
  
She sat, legs dangling, on the desk which she’d shoved up against the wall, along with the rest of the rented apartment’s furniture to leave the carpeted space bare. Across from her were the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on Taris. The sun had begun to set and despite the lights of the city’s skyscrapers, of which this habitation was one, the stars in the sky had begun to appear.  
  
“I watched a whole lot of holovids from the Clone Wars to get the details right,” Rey said. “I mean I hope I got all the details right—“  
  
She watched her reflection in the tempered glass, swinging her feet under the desk.  
  
“The tunic and belt were easy enough to find. The robe though, I actually stitched that up myself—“ Finding the right fabric had been the most difficult part. She’d otherwise found that she knew exactly how long the sleeves should be, how long the cloak would have to fall to graze the floor. “I mean, I’m not the best stitcher there is but—“  
  
Reflected in the glass, she saw him emerge from behind the partition, and whatever she was supposed to say disappeared into a tiny “oh.”  
  
Beside her was someone who for all intents and purposes was a Jedi Knight.  
  
She turned towards him, her mouth forming shapes through which nothing but unintelligible blustering was emerging. He was even putting an effort to ease the scowl that was curling up his lip.  
  
“How do I look?” he asked. It managed not to be too sarcastic.  
  
Rey eased herself to her feet, heat rising up her neck, and an entirely different rush taking ahold of her between her legs.  
  
“You look—really nice.” She turned away like she couldn’t quite contain looking at him, but then looked back because she had to. “Um. It. Suits you.”  
  
He set his lips in a perfectly straight line, like he’d suddenly found his boots to be filled with mucky water. He’d caught a glimpse of what he looked like in the glass.  
  
“What next?” he asked, turning to her. “Do I go through a training gauntlet too?”  
  
“Oh, no,” Rey perked up, turning back to the desk. “I’m not unreasonable. But I do need to see this look in full—“  
  
Rey brought out two lightsabers from the bottom of her pack. One was hers - her double-bladed personal lightsaber, powered by the kyber crystal he had given her way back in Scarif. The other, she sent drifting towards him across the air.  
  
He caught it before realizing what it was. And then it was his turn to be stunned.  
  
He was holding Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber.  
  
“You’re letting me…?”  
  
“Yes,” Rey said.  
  
A strange look came upon him. She could see how the grip fit in his hand like it were made for him. Like someone sleepwalking, he followed her to the middle of the room. A subtle change came to the way he walked. His back was straighter, his shoulders set. His face became that of a student, willing to learn, and anxious to please, entirely bereft of the arrogance that came with the mask, and the dark cowl.  
  
She ignited her lightsaber, just the top blade, casting a warm golden glow on the floor. Automatically, he snapped to form, thumb grazing the switch, the searing blue illuminating his face (the same blue, Rey thought, she had used to give him that scar).  
  
She tapped his blade with hers, stepping back as she did. It was a signal for him to step forward. He blocked a tap from above, another from below. And then he seamlessly replicated her moves, while she blocked - mid, high, low. It was an easy rhythm, marked by the hum of the sabers. One, two, three. Stepping forward, backward, forward. It had been among the first lightsaber exercises Luke had taught her, and she had assumed, him as well.  
  
But as they continued, something in him seemed to wind itself tighter and tighter. His stance grew sloppier, the blows coming stronger. Small, fleeting glimpses of what he was seeing inside his mind struck Rey like shrapnel from an exploded ordinance.  
  
He had been terrified of the ignited blade, at the plasma glow of it. _’Don’t worry,’_ Luke had told him, _‘You’ll get used to it. Soon enough, you’ll be constructing your own—‘_. And he had gotten used to it, wielding the weight and thrum of it had become as natural as breathing. One, two, three. _‘Now you’re getting it! Put a little more strength into it—‘_ One, two, three. _‘No, no—control. Remember, calm your mind—‘_ One, two, three. _‘That won’t help you. You have to control your rage—‘_ One, two—  
  
His last strike was so strong the blades sparked off each other, but she bore it as she had countless times before in actual battles. A storm played out on his face. But she leaned into the weight of his attack, grim, refusing to look away.  
  
He broke from the lock. And then as though he suddenly remembered he wasn’t wearing the mask, he turned his back to her.  
  
“I can’t do this,” he said.  
  
There was a low electric murmur as she powered her lightsaber down.  
  
“It’s just a game,” she said.  
  
He shot her a look over his shoulder. “Do you truly believe that?” His reflection glared at her. “Isn’t this what you want me to be?”  
  
He smirked at the beige-colored tunic, the long brown robes. Mockery dripped thickly from his voice. “Why don’t I just renounce the First Order, be a Jedi, help you and Skywalker fix up the very school I helped destroy. Forget all the horror I’ve inflicted upon the galaxy. Forget that I—” _Killed my father._ “I am forgiven for all my sins, aren’t I?”  
  
He turned back to her, making her wonder how often his face looked that way, contorted in seething rage, beneath the mask. “Go ahead. Tell me this is what you want.”  
  
“It is,” she said, her grip on her own saber tightening, refusing to be cowed into tempering that sentiment. “It is _very close_ to what I want.”  
  
It might have been her honesty that took him aback.  
  
“Nothing but truth between us right?” she said. Briefly she remembered what he looked like asleep in that tiny room above the cantina, at the surge it had given her. It appeared now, in her voice. “I want you to be someone I fight alongside instead of against. I want to be able to fuck you at our leisure. I—I’m tired of hiding.”  
  
His voice softened. “We’ve been here before.” Back in that snowed-in winter estate, a lifetime ago. “I asked you to come with me—“  
  
“I said no,” Rey said. “And then I asked you to come with me—“  
  
“And I said no.”  
  
A tiny smile fluttered on her lips. “You did. But since then, since all—this. Hadn’t you ever—even for a small moment—reconsidered my offer?”  
  
His shoulders dropped. “I told the Supreme Leader I would never be seduced by the Light. You’ve made it very difficult.”  
  
“There is strength in the Light,” Rey said quietly. “I have learned this. And you know this too. It’s why you have to fight so hard against it.”  
  
His eyes remained on the floor. “Even if I wanted to—I’ve done too much.” He made a futile gesture, making the sleeves of the robe billow around him. “Like I told my—like I told Han Solo, it’s too late for me. I will never be Jedi.”  
  
Within Rey came the feeling of something crumbling into a vacuum.  
  
“Well. Like I said, _this_ is just a game.” She paused. “Even if what’s between us is not.”  
  
She sidestepped the feeling, trying to turn her focus on what she could do now.  
  
“Let me try something,” she suddenly said, walking towards him.  
  
She leaned in close enough for his breath to swirl around her neck, and he tilted his head forward so she could put her fingers on either side of his head. She tried to ignore how distracting his gaze was, this close.  
  
“In this game, did you imagine I’d be your padawan?” he asked, voice low. It made a tiny tremor go down Rey’s spine.  
  
“Oh. No. I thought you could be Master Jedi whatever-you-like. And I’d be…well I guess I’d just be Rey.”  
  
“I suppose you are,” he said.  
  
Rey closed her eyes and reached out with the Force.  
  
  
The inside of his mind was like a series of shattered mirrors, all broken edges and splintered reflections. When Rey tried to reach out, the shards threatened to break into tinier pieces under her hands.  
  
He was skittish - that, she should have expected.  
  
“It’s alright…” she whispered, eyes still shut. He seemed to be holding his breath.  
  
Rey sifted through his memories as gently as she possibly could. There he was stalking down the long hallways of Starkiller Base, radiating bestial confidence—convening the Knights on Mustafar, the vicious triumph he felt when they bent the knee to him—the swift rage, striking down an old man who had dared mention his bloodline—no, these were not the memories she needed. She had to go deeper.  
  
Out in the apartment, he shuddered. “It’s alright,” Rey said again.  
  
She dove into the cavern of his thoughts, where the mirror pieces of his memories had been smashed into little twinkling splinters. He had been a boy, waking up from another nightmare, into the silence of a moonlight-filtered room, and he was alone, and afraid—he sat, sullen, at a Dejarik board, the pieces frozen in position for what had been weeks—he stood before Luke Skywalker, his legendary uncle, the wind sweeping the man’s Jedi robes back, and the boy had thought one day, one day that could be me, and the idea had filled him with both fear and determination—but then came the disappointment, inevitable as day turned to night—he had awoken to a whisper in the darkness. ‘ _Grandfather…?_ ’—  
  
Rey elbowed these away. No, she needed something different. Something—  
  
There. Another memory, one made entirely of light so that it stood out in the shadows of his thoughts.  
  
Rey took it like she might have held a firefly between her cupped hands. He was at a window that looked out into the night sky - stars sprinkled as far as he could see, and the gentle coil of nebulae, tinged with distant blues. Somewhere beyond the window came the sound of the ocean, waves lapping at the shore. A gentle breeze touched his face and he—  
  
—in that moment, he was completely satisfied.  
  
Rey carried the memory to the forefront of his mind, willing it to spread - the breeze on his face. The coil of the galaxy above, chaotic but beautiful. The feeling that at this moment, all was right in the universe—  
  
—she opened her eyes, just as he did.  
  
“What are you doing?” he whispered, something stirring in his eyes.  
  
“I wanted you to remember what it was like to be at peace,” she said.  
  
He remained perfectly still, her arms still on his shoulders, drinking deep of the moment. Had it been him who leaned forward, or her who looked up, so that now their foreheads touched?  
  
“Enough,” he said, gently easing away. The memory ebbed, disappearing back into the place he had banished it to. “That’s—enough for me.”  
  
Rey kept her fingers at the sides of his head, burying them in his hair. “I’d like to kiss you now, Master Jedi whatever-you-like, if you don’t mind.”  
  
His hand settled at the back of her head, and his voice was surprisingly gentle. “This Master Jedi would like to do significantly more than kiss you,” he said.  
  
  
She thought he’d bend down to kiss her in the mouth, but he went to the side, pressing his nose against the underside of her jaw. He was so warm—his one hand remaining at the back of her head, the other reaching downward behind her. He pressed his lips against the line of her neck, soft as a kiss, but his teeth came down on the skin, sending a tremor that made its way across Rey’s shoulders—it was a distraction. Suddenly his arm was at the back of her legs and he was carrying her up off her feet.  
  
Rey swallowed back a gasp, realizing that the floor was gone from beneath her shoes, that she was looking up at the ceiling, catching the look of want on his face—considering how odd this was, he was carrying her like she weighed nothing at all—and then the carpet was coming up to meet her back, and she had automatically clutched the fold of his tunic, her grip still attached to it as he knelt in the space between her knees, and pulled the robe off his shoulders, leaving it in a puddle behind him.  
  
Wordlessly, he tugged her pants off her hips, Rey inhaling sharply as the air touched the sudden wetness of her cunt, releasing her breath all at once when he buried his face between her legs.  
  
“I guess this is—“ She pressed her head back, as his tongue went deep between the folds, she could feel the steady probe of it, slipping in and out of her. “—is—untoward behavior—for a Jedi.”  
  
His tongue did not stop, the tip of it slipping upwards, finding the nub of her clit, tracing shapes on it, patterns that made Rey bite into the back of her hand, to keep from crying out loud.  
  
_‘The Jedi did have sex,’_ his thoughts slipped into her mind, casually, as his tongue left a tattoo of flicks on the point of her clit, sending tightness up to the ends of Rey’s toes. _’But it was discouraged, being that it paved the way to the baser emotions—flip over.’_  
  
Rey turned herself over, knees and elbows sliding against the carpeting. Her chin was on the floor, the broad side of his tongue painting a line up the curve of her ass as his hands parted the cheeks.  
  
_‘Led to—attachments—‘_  
  
“Are you really giving me a history lesson right now?” she asked, between breaths.  
  
_‘Just to make a point—Consider it to be to your benefit—‘_ the tip of his tongue found its way down the cleft, to the ring of her asshole. _‘—that I’m no Jedi.’_  
  
In the glass window, she could see him leaned over her rear, as he began to lick. Even as he lapped her up, his thoughts drifted into her mind, the words losing form, devolving into crude, burning, impulse.  
  
_‘I am going to—‘_  
  
Rey watched the motion of his head in the glass, her fingers closing on the carpet.  
  
_‘—fuck you—‘_  
  
The edges of his tongue swept along the rim.  
  
_‘—right here.’_  
  
She released a small, tight, sigh.  
  
_‘Yes?’_  
  
“Yes,” she said.  
  
That look on his face, reflected in the window, was one she was much more familiar with. Gone was the rigidity of posture, the subtle anxiety when he had first donned the robes. They had given way to an all-pervading want, one she could feel in the way he grasped her hips, pulling her ass up towards his dick, seemingly unaware of how the lapels of the tunic had gone loose on his chest, so when his arm rolled upwards, his bare shoulder lifted free of the fold.  
  
She found herself watching his face in the glass, as he pushed into her, at the way his eyes drifted half-shut, his lips hardening at the edges. Rey did not hold back. Her moaning spilled out into the room, growing when he began fucking her in earnest, tugging her hips against him when he thrusted forward.

She didn't know how long it lasted, the friction building up within her, taking him deep, moving with him as he yanked her back, until he came in deep shudders that made him clench his teeth, not quite stifling the noise that welled up from his chest.  
  
He released her, breathing hard. Rey allowed herself to fully sink down onto the floor, curving back towards him, chin resting on her arm. The tunic had opened all the way down to his navel.

She smiled, a single bead of sweat leaving salt on her lower lip.  
  
“I still think those robes look good on you,” she said.  
  
He leaned back on his hands, hair across his eyes. “Probably why you’re the only person who gets to see me in them.”  
  
She laughed at that, deciding she’d give him maybe two minutes before she straddled him herself, but a noise came from the desk - a sudden urgent beeping that made Rey’s blood run cold.

The communicator.  


Suddenly, she was on her feet (no no no no not now—) and the communicator was buzzing violently against the surface of the desk.  
  
She took it in hand, throwing a look at Kylo. His initial look of alarm had drained away into sullen understanding.  
  
A harried voice came from the other end - a few rushed statements—a place and a situation, a vague picture of enemy numbers and positions, a series of invectives describing how many people they were losing, how soon can you get here? As soon as I can, Rey said, painfully aware of the drip between her legs, the flushing of her face. She was still breathing like she had run a mile. The call cut off abruptly, signalling just how little time she had.  
  
She turned back to Kylo, still on the floor. _Maybe I don’t have to go so quickly, I can stay a little longer_ —but the thought had barely formed when she pushed it away, tugging her pants back up, summoning the lightsabers to her hand. She knew where she had to be at this moment, even if the thought of leaving him here made her stomach turn.  
  
“I’m sorry,” she said. The urge rose in her to explain—to cushion his disappointment, and hers—but he knew her duty as well as she did.  
  
He watched with a look like a lake frozen over on the surface but with massive restless creatures lurking underneath. “You do what you must,” he said simply.  
  
He raised his face towards her so she could kiss him in the cheek. “I’ll see you again,” she said. “Soon.”  
  
“Soon,” he agreed.  
  
But he called to her as she reached the threshold. “What about the—?” he tugged on his tunic, gestured towards the robe still crumpled on the carpet.  
  
She tried not to let how distraught that made her show on her face. “I guess…you can just get rid of it all.”  
  
And she swept out the door.  
  
***  
  
Kylo considered just lying back on the floor and remaining there until the sun came back up again. He’d received regular reports on how much ground the Resistance had lost, despite the aid of the Jedi. The supremacy of the First Order would not be denied. There was a time when that thought would have buoyed him, but now, it did nothing for the warring notions that chased each others' tails within him.  
  
On one hand, it occurred to him that the day would come when she would be tossed into a situation she would not be able to walk away from - not for all her skill and power. He had a suspicion that he would be present when that finally happened, and the dread it inspired left him chilled.  
  
On the other hand, was the creeping sense that here he was again, left alone.  
  
A torrent rushed through him, an entirely different color of heat then the one that had possessed him just a few minutes ago.  
  
He got up, raised his hand outward and his own lightsaber (so much less refined than Anakin’s, he thought) sailed into his grip. He was going to tear this room to shreds—he could already see himself doing it—knew exactly how it would feel to lose himself in the pendulum swing of his arm, the fire-tinged gashes he would leave on the walls—but something gave him pause.  
  
It was his reflection in the window, once again.  
  
Almost unconsciously, he found himself pulling the tunic back into place, fixing the belt. He really did look like a Jedi, it was ridiculous.  
  
He ignited the lightsaber, even though the livid red of it seemed wrong when he was in this outfit. For now, he ignored this.  
  
He went back into stance. One, two, three, following the forms she had led him through earlier, his feet shuffling in time to the strikes. The constant crackle of his saber gave way to low humming every time he swung. By small degrees, his rage seemed to ebb, lost to the rhythm - back, forward, back. His mind began to drift, towards that memory she had found somewhere at the back of his head, of a nighttime sky and the smell of the sea.  
  
She hadn’t seemed to realize where that memory had come from.  
  
He had looked out the window, towards that star-strewn horizon, and the beat of the waves on the shore had been soothing. It was at the end of a day mostly comprised of walking, and then of making the deeper acquaintance of his new companion—she slept in the bedroll under the window, her hair in a mess around her head, shoulders peeking through the blanket. Her name, he knew, was Rey. The island was doing something to fog his memory, so he couldn’t quite remember how he knew her so well. But he had no doubt at all of what came to life within him, as he watched the gentle rise and fall of her back.  
  
It only occurred to Kylo now, just how much relief that had given him - to be outside the tug of the Dark and the Light, of what he’d left behind and what stood before him, for all the opposing voices in his head to give way to one singular truth. He had no doubt at all—  
  
Kylo recoiled from the thought, stepping back like something had struck him.  
  
His grip on the saber tightened. With a cry, he struck out against the desk, bringing his full weight behind the blow, slicing right through the piece. He stood, watching the singed wood glow. Something within him had splintered through, and the torrent that followed threatened to wash him away. He couldn’t find the strength to strike again.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said that per chapter, this installment of the trilogy would have less words than the previous? Yeah, nope nope nope :D. Not gunna happen anymore. It comes, I suppose, with the escalation of Everything.
> 
> Next chapter shouuuuld be up by Wednesday (if not, Thursday, weep). It will be the last of these "stand-alone" chapters, and then 14, 15, and 16 will be more or less one long ride to the end. 
> 
> Originally figured I'd have this fic wrapped up before the first Last Jedi trailers hit (because the moment they do, my interpretations of the characters will be affected, and I need to see this particular version of these two where they need to go :D). I think that'll still be the case.


	13. On dancing

**[MU9431-YJL]**  
sayagain ><>SDjFh troublegetting your messag>><<s  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
I asked, can you make it this time?  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
yes I think so U__U() >><MNoH.  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
That’s also what you said last time. And the time before that.  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
><<>#(8SIGK this time i’m sure sure.  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
Your messages are all garbled.  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
><><<579HSFoh that’s the<><<>orbital bombardment. 80sDHBE base compromised.  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
get out of there  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
doing that.  <>E><PDyy>>Chandrila right<<<>>^^  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
lets discuss another time  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
No >><<865smightnot get thechance. monthfrom now. i’ll be there  
  
**[MU9431-YJL]**  
><<SIN#LSHOA<<>6sKFqer  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
Your last message didn’t come in right.  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
Are you receiving this?  
  
**[BP5735-ZFG]**  
Rey?

  
CHANDRILA  
Ranian Palace  
Hanna City  
  
  
It didn’t seem like there was a war. The wind was balmy, bringing in the taste of the Silver Sea, and as the sun began to set, the festival began. It was a celebration of the anniversary of the signing of the Instruments of Surrender after the last of Palpatine’s Empire had lost the Battle of Jakku. At least that’s what Kylo had told Rey.  
  
Rey leaned out on the parapet, watching as the lanterns in the plaza beneath all came alive at once, in shades of red and gold and blue. From somewhere came the sound of a bow on strings, a light tune that grew headier with the tap of drums, and the climbing melody of a two-necked flute. Despite everything—the days on the run, the sleepless nights, the end of one battle signalling the beginning of the next—Rey found herself smiling, tapping her nails on the stone balustrade to the beat.  
  
She looked over her shoulder, but he didn’t seem to notice the music at all. Kylo was seated at the outdoor table set, nursing the same glass of wine he’d had for the last hour. The balcony that their room led out into covered this entire wall of the palace, but they were the only ones there. That meant that he didn’t have to wear his hooded cloak—it was a bit too warm for that anyway. He was in a dark tunic, loose at the sleeves and collar.  
  
Rey, on the other hand, was in a dress. It was an exceedingly simple frock, the same material and color as her scavenger gear, but cut to flow with the wind. She had purchased it from the bazaar outside—just because, as she told him, she was feeling festive (considering the state the Resistance had fallen into, she needed any reason to feel festive).  
  
Down below, pairs had begun congregating in the square made by the hanging lanterns. Arm in arm, they began to swirl. Rey glanced at Kylo over her shoulder again, feeling a sweet little churn that she just had to act on.  
  
He looked up, raising an eyebrow at the look on her face.  
  
“What would it take to get you to dance with me?” Rey asked.  
  
He leaned back in the seat, so as to get a better look at her. “You’re not joking,” he said.  
  
From the plaza, the tune had picked up, though Rey knew well enough it wasn’t just that that made her feel like winged insects were buzzing in her belly.  
  
“There’s no rule against it,” she said. “Besides, we’re in a war. One of us might die tomorrow. Tell me what it would take to get you to dance with me right here, right now.”  
  
He tilted his head to the side. “I suppose you could ask.”  
  
Rey tried to suppress a grin. She had not been sure this would actually work.  
  
“I’m asking,” she said.  
  
He got to his feet.  
  
They moved into the shadow cast by the awning. Rey was practically giddy now. She put her hands on his forearms, leaving him to hold her by the elbows, and went into a series of jittery sidesteps, tapping the floor with her toe, and going towards the other side, more or less in time with the music. He allowed her to move him along, with a look of growing amusement.  
  
“What are we doing, exactly?” he finally asked.  
  
“Dancing,” Rey said. “There was this guy, back in Niima Station, some years ago. He said that this was how people danced in the Core Worlds.”  
  
“Really? You didn’t consider that the nerf-herder didn’t know what he was talking about?”  
  
“I did consider he just told me that to get in my pants,” she laughed.  
  
“Did it work?”  
  
She shrugged. “Yeah.”  
  
“I should be so lucky.” He paused, still grasping her arms. “Would you like me to lead?”  
  
Rey blinked. “What do you mean ‘lead’?”  
  
He sighed. “Just—go with what I do.”  
  
He put her right hand on his shoulder, intertwining his fingers with her left. His other hand went around her waist, drawing her in close enough to feel the warmth of him. Just as the music began to swell, he _swept_ her in an arc that stilled the breath in her throat.  
  
Her feet fell in with his, following the measure of the chords. She could feel when he was about to go left, or right, reading his movements as she did when they dueled. Except her arm had hooked around his neck, and she could see herself reflected in his eyes. She began to settle into the rhythm - one, two, three. Forward, backward, forward.  
  
“Kriff—“ she muttered. “You _know_ how to dance.”  
  
He gave a tiny shrug. “The Alderaan Memorial Ball,” he said. “Every year since I was four years old.”  
  
They brushed past the balustrade, so that the lights from the plaza briefly tinged his face. “Come to think of it, I learned to dance before I learned to fight.”  
  
Rey laughed at that. As the music slowed, so did they, until it seemed they were adrift under the stars that shone over Chandrila. Rey found that the dance was naturally drawing her closer to him, in a tightening ring.

“Can’t imagine you enjoyed all those parties,” Rey said, suddenly painfully aware of the blood rushing within her. Surely, this close, he could hear the thundering in her veins.  
  
“It was a nightmare,” he said. “All those stuffed shirts trying to style me as the Prince of Lost Alderaan. Or the Scion of House Organa. I learned that the best one can do is find a reason to step outside.”  
  
His voice drifted low. “My…My dad—he also liked to stay outside. Gave me my first glass of Corellian brandy. Drink it up, he said, it’ll make going back inside a bit easier. That was the last ball I ever attended.”  
  
For a brief moment, Rey heard Han Solo’s voice in his. He seemed to realize this as well. They came to a halt as the music played on.  
  
Not for the first time, Rey found herself looking up at his face and wondering at the thoughts that went on behind it - if she were to dip into his mind now, she’d find herself swept away in a storm.  
  
“This, as well. This is the last time isn’t it?” he asked.  
  
They both knew that the ground beneath their feet was crumbling. He didn’t need to mention how the Resistance had found itself drawn thin unto snapping under the fist of the First Order. She didn’t need to tell him that the brass of the Resistance clung to hope, and that between that hope and the threat of destruction was the puissance for one last assault, one last chance to knock the First Order to its knees. And when the time came, he would be the Master of the Knights of Ren, and she would be Skywalker’s apprentice.  
  
“I think—yes, this is the last time,” Rey said, amazed at how unperturbed she sounded.  
  
A shadow crossed his face, that deepened as Rey slipped away from his grasp, stepping back. The music still straining over her head, she wandered over to the table, where that glass of wine sat. She felt as though she’d walked right out of her body, that it was through miles and miles of void that she felt the lip of the wine glass under her finger.  
  
“Sandstorms fade,” she said. “Roads come to an end. And wars reach their resolution.”  
  
She tried to ignore the pounding of her heart. “I had imagined—well. Dreamed—that by the time this happened, we’d be on the same side. I think you did as well.”  
  
He straightened, the calm of his face threatening to break. “I don’t deny it.”  
  
“And yet, here we are,” Rey said. Her eyes slid down to the wine glass. “This wasn’t going to last forever.”  
  
He stalked towards the table, planting himself across her, his composure at its limits. “And this is how it ends?”  
  
“Ren—“ a strained note entered her tone, growing out of the cracks that threatened to splinter through her. “I don’t _want_ this to end. I wanted this to last as long as it could—“  
  
“Why?” he asked, his voice low, but he couldn’t quite keep the edge from it. “All this—dancing, and drinking, and—“ something caught in his voice. “—Fucking. Why?”  
  
Rey gripped the sides of the table, keeping herself propped up, despite the scream in her veins.  
  
“My feelings for you are complicated,” she said. “The first time I saw you, you were trying to kill me—“  
  
“I was not trying to kill you,” he said quickly, “You were the one shooting at me—“  
  
“You abducted me—“  
  
“I needed the map. I didn’t want to harm you—“  
  
“And then Starkiller happened. And every time I saw you afterwards, we would fight. But even when we were fighting, I knew there was more to you than what I was seeing. I’ve been in your mind after all.”  
  
“I wanted to know more,” she mumbled. “And I found out that—“ she dropped her shoulders. “I actually enjoyed your company. A lot. In all the ways I could enjoy it.”  
  
She prepared herself for what she might see when she looked up at his face, but there was nothing there but the quiet of early snowfall in the woods.  
  
“I don’t know when I began to need you, but I welcomed it. Even when I knew that we’d get to this point, eventually.” Rey gave him a thin smile. “‘Why?’ I should ask you the same question.”  
  
For a brief moment, he looked away, pondering on what she said. He breathed in, deeply, as though he were bracing himself. Then with the same calm—that Rey now saw, hid a trembling underneath—he turned to her again.  
  
“I love you,” he said.  
  
Rey’s entire world vanished into the moment those words hung in the air.  
  
His face reddened. “I believe I have for a while now,” his voice grew stilted, like he was trying desperately to keep ahold of a script he’d prepared and rehearsed over and over again.  
  
“When it became clear to me, I grew angry—with myself—realizing that you had defeated me in every possible way. And then—” It was like something had tightened around his throat. “—I gave in.”  
  
If just a moment ago, Rey had felt she was miles away, now everything clouded around her senses - the breeze that stroked the hairs that had fallen across her cheek, the sweat at her fingertips, pressed against the surface of the table, his gaze, which had never dug deeper into her than it did now. She couldn’t move.  
  
“There is no real aim in telling you this,” he said. “As you said, this wasn’t going to last forever.”  
  
His eyes gleamed. “I would just like you to tell me if knowing gives you nothing but pain, so that I can put my hopes to rest.”  
  
Rey considered him, the set of his shoulders, the straightness of his back, like he were anticipating being struck.  
  
“Pain?” Rey found her own voice strange to hear, as though she’d passed through a veil and emerged as someone else entirely. “Does knowing give me…? No, I’m happy.”  
  
He looked up at that, startled. The words began to froth out of her, unbidden and uncontrollable as the velvet warmth that spread within.  
  
“I’m so happy. I’m—relieved? Yes. I—didn’t think you—I mean, I wasn’t sure. I love you too. I would think it whenever I saw your face. I didn’t know how—if I should tell you—but it was becoming difficult to keep inside me—This is. The happiest I’ve ever been.”  
  
She stopped herself, certain that she had made absolutely no sense at all. He certainly looked like she had said something that had flown entirely over his head.  
  
“You love me?” he asked.  
  
"Yes."

His voice was struck with wonder. "We love each other?"

Out of breath, Rey nodded her head.  
  
Kylo made a small gesture with his hand and the table between them tumbled off to the side in a screech of metal, the wine glass smashing to the floor. Rey crossed the space, and they fell into each other's arms, holding on with all the strength they possessed. Nothing in the universe could have moved them from that spot.  
  
Rey turned her chin up. Out of the maelstrom of shock, through the pang of knowing just how fleeting this moment was, a smile fought its way to the corner of his mouth. As Rey watched, it spread itself across his face, entirely outside his control, until she couldn’t help but smile too.  
  
“Then I’m also happy,” he said softly.  
  
She held him to her, wondering how she’d never noticed how much she liked the scent of the crook of his neck. They remained that way, seconds slipping by as she breathed him in.  
  
_‘What happens to us now?’_ The question formed itself clearly inside his mind.  
  
Like her, he could feel the edges of this night falling away, a straight drop down a waterfall.  
  
_‘I don’t know,’_ Rey thought back. _‘I’m afraid to look beyond this moment.’_  
  
His grip around her tightened. ‘ _It always comes back to this, doesn’t it?_ ’  
  
She planted her cheek against his chest. ‘ _It does._ ’  
  
  
  
The decision to return to the room was made without uttering a sound. The night had gained a momentum, as it always did, and Kylo simply found that Rey’s hand was in his, and he allowed himself to be led back through the elaborately latticed door.  
  
Rey stepped out of her shoes as she walked towards the bed, was unknotting the neck strap of her dress, yanking the entire thing off over her head. It fell to the floor in a heap. But as she paused at the bedside, undoing her chest bindings, she looked up to find that he was still hovering near the door. Kylo knew his face was burning, and he was so hard he could almost feel the throb against his pants, but he remained still, hands at his back.  
  
“Are you okay?” she asked, sliding her undergarments down her legs, picking them off her ankle. “Don’t tell me you’re nervous all of a sudden.”  
  
“I’m not,” he said. He was, just a little.  
  
He had already memorized the scars across her body, souvenirs from Jakku and the Jedi path. In the dim lamp light, he followed the whitened lines across her shoulders, that one blotchy starburst at her hip, the faded scratches near her left foot.  
  
“You’re, uh, lovely,” he said. It came out far more bluntly than he would have liked, but she cracked a grin.  
  
“Considering we’ve been sleeping together this whole time, I’d figured you found me at least somewhat attractive.”  
  
“Somewhat,” he agreed, making his way to the bed and tugging the shirt off over his head.  
  
She came up behind as he sat at the edge of the bed to undo his boots, leaning herself against him so he could feel the press of her breasts against the broad of his back. She leaned her chin against his shoulder and reached down to his lap, her hand slipping under the band of his pants, finding his dick. A tremor went through him—her fingers were very warm.  
  
“You’re lovely too,” she said, as he exhaled, slowly. She was rolling the flat of her thumb over the shaft, her grip firm, creating a pocket of heat right past the line of his pants.  
  
“Except for your face, that is,” she chuckled against his neck. “Obviously, I completely ruined that.”  
  
He turned to her. “You’re going to be seeing quite a lot of my face tonight.”  
  
“It does have its charms. Especially when you look…” He felt the coil of her grip shift, moving up to the tip of his dick, strumming the head with the crook of her fingers. “…just like that.”  
  
“Not nearly as charming as the look on your face,” he said, through his teeth, “When I put it in you.”  
  
  
It was in the way her lips tightened, he thought. Or in the crease that appeared in her brow, as he eased himself into her. Maybe it was how her voice lightened into a murmur, into airiness, when he started to fuck her, slowly, that shameless noise which said she was enjoying this. Enjoying him. Which made him want to drive into her, to see how far he could stretch the strings of her nerves, to make every pluck resonate in her limbs, as he had done so many times before.  
  
But the night was slipping by too quickly, and he couldn’t rid himself of the notion that for every bit of joy they derived from this, there would be a reckoning somehow. He had given in to sentiment - crashed through the ceiling of it, had not stopped falling.  
  
The rules they had constructed to preserve their time together now lay in pieces around them. All his restraint—all the discipline the Supreme Leader had instilled in him to feel nothing for enemies of the Order—the guards he had put into place around his mind, against her—were all gone, leaving something else—someone else behind.  
  
He slowed down a bit. "Rey."

She looked up at him, eyes softly lidded, arms around his shoulders.  
  
“Would you—“ This was more difficult than he ever thought it would be. It was like trying to move against the hold of the Force, when all of his will couldn't bring him a step forward.  
  
But she touched the side of his face, the back of her fingers against his cheek, and it gave him strength.  
  
“—would you call me Ben?”  
  
Her eyes widened.  
  
He suppressed a shudder, his voice dropping to a whisper, feeling for a moment he might break in half. “Please?”  
  
The smile which broke through her face was a sight he would never forget, piercing the core of him.  
  
“Ben,” she said his name like she had carefully carried it within her all this time, waiting for the moment to say it aloud, and now giving it voice was the easiest thing in the world. “Ben—of course.”  
  
Her grip around his shoulders tightened, legs winding around his hips, like now that she had him, she’d never let him go. Something long knotted seemed to unfurl within him, years of entanglement coming loose.

He gasped with the release that flooded him, pushing himself into her again.  
  
“Yes—” her voice grew tighter. “Fuck me harder, Ben—“  
  
His name on her tongue was like the ringing of a chime, making him go harder, into the heat of her cunt.

“Ben—" she continued, her voice drifting higher. "I love it when you're inside me—more, Ben—“

He was going to claim every inch of that channel, pushing deeper with every gust of breath, every taut whimper, through which she pronounced his name.  
  
He slipped his hands behind her and heaved her upwards—his name caught in her throat as her back arched—pulling them up to a sitting position, even while he remained deep inside her.  
  
She began to grind down against him, hips moving in slow circles that his dick was at the center of, before suddenly switching the rhythm, going up and down on his dick, never giving him a moment to settle into her motions, drawing sensation upon sensation out.  
  
“Ben-” her hair had drifted down across her face.  
  
He looked up at her, breathing through his lips.  
  
“--Make me come,” she said, with a tiny smile.  
  
With a sudden lurch in his guts, he realized that she was going to come while saying his name.  
  
He pushed up against her weight, going strong like he knew she liked in the seconds before coming. She followed his movements, meeting every push with a press of her own, her face given entirely to the feel of him inside her ( _charming_ , he thought, somewhere at the back of his mind).  
  
She bit her lip, tensing, the walls of her cunt clutching around him—but he pushed into her again, catching her off-guard, a cry bursting out as she found herself riding a series of peaks, all of her straining through the crest, the fall, the crest again—he didn’t stop—wouldn’t, until he heard her say his name again. But at the last moment, just as the tightness of her was most excruciating, she pressed her mouth down against his, one hand lost behind his head in a fistful of hair.  
  
His name rang in her mind, and he came in the same moment. ‘ _Rey,_ ’ he thought. _‘Rey. Rey. Rey.’_  
  
  
They were tangled together in the sheets. He had one arm around her shoulders, her chin resting on his collar.  
  
“We will see each other at least one more time,” he said. They didn't know when, or where.

He wove his fingers through her hair, tracing the length of it down past her shoulders, in a motion that he realized was as comforting for him as it was for her.  
  
She hadn't responded. In her mind was a murkiness he couldn’t quite piece through, but there was a flinty resolve in her eyes as she gazed back at him, that sharpened as she lay her hand across his face.

Then the hard lines softened, and she almost smiled.

"I look forward to it," she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd been wanting to get to this chapter for a while now :D. 
> 
> There's an easter egg in there for those of you who have read Aftermath: Empire's End (because they were on -Chandrila- during the -anniversary of the Empire's surrender- wink wink).
> 
> Next update should be up by Tuesday-ishh.


	14. The Light

JAKKU  
The Observatory  
First Order Bastion

  
  
He was around here somewhere. She could feel his presence like a quivering in the fabric of the Force, separate from the tremors beneath her feet from the battle that raged miles above.  
  
Everything the Resistance had to throw was either out in the sands of Jakku or the space above, meeting the First Order in an all-out assault. An observer might have seen it as an act of desperation, but as the Generals had conferred—while Rey had listened, one foot up on her seat, idly running a finger down her lightsaber—it was not about wiping the First Order out - it was about buying her time to do what needed to be done. She had looked up then, realizing she now knew when and where she’d be seeing him again.  
  
The tunnels went on interminably under the First Order’s bastion. They seemed to lead right into the past, going from the pristine walkways and blazing lights which were the hallmark of First Order architecture, to similar but obviously older corridors in the Imperial design, and then to dark stone halls with strange striated pillars and archways that Rey recognized as the work of the ancient Sith.  
  
This deep underground, the tunnels had widened into vast chambers, with the walls and ceiling lost to shadow. She’d left a trail of stormtroopers and guard droids on her way down, but more would be coming. All the more reason for her to hurry—  
  
—she stopped cold.  
  
From around the next bend came that familiar figure in the mask and the cowl. He must have felt her presence as she did his.  
  
Rey fought the urge to reach for her saber. She had thought she was prepared for this moment, had imagined it over and over since the assault plans had been laid. No, even before that. Since departing from Chandrila. She knew what she would tell him, but now doubt gripped her.  
  
He made his way up to her at a casual pace.  
  
“Hello,” he said.  
  
Rey felt herself seizing up, still unwilling to let her guard down.  
  
“I will not fight you,” she blurted out. “I refuse to.”  
  
As he walked, he reached up and slid the helmet off. Underneath was that face she knew so well, but bereft of all rage it looked strikingly different.  
  
“That’s a relief,” he said mildly. “I was about to refuse to fight you.”  
  
“Ben—“ Rey began, but he had bent toward her and kissed her full in the mouth, a warm kiss, with one hand behind her head, bringing her close.  
  
Of their own accord, her hands dug into the folds of his cowl, like he might drift away if she didn’t.  
  
Up at ground level, the bombardment was reaching its peak. Fine sand sprinkled down from the roof of the underground chamber. At the moment, none of it mattered at all.  
  
“Ben,” she said again, when he finally drew away.  
  
“Rey,” he said in response, looking pleased to say her name. His hand remained in her hair. “Tell me how you’ve been.”  
  
She looked up questioningly. _Right now, really?_  
  
“Um. Fine? I’m going to go deal with Snoke.” That had sounded a lot more valiant in her head. And then just because it seemed polite, she asked, “You?”  
  
“I’ve dispersed the Knights,” he said, as though it were an inconsequential matter, like he’d had dustcrepe for lunch, or spotted a pair of tooka cats on the walk home. “They took some convincing, but they’ve always been more loyal to me than the Supreme Leader.”  
  
His face grew grave. “I’ve been biding my time, purposely clouding my thoughts, my intentions. But by now it’s impossible that the Supreme Leader doesn’t know.”  
  
“Then come with me,” Rey said, her heart leaping.“We can take him down together—”  
  
But something in his face told her that wasn’t what was going to happen.  
  
“Do you know what’s behind you?” he asked, idly strumming his fingers through her hair.  
  
Rey didn’t even need to cast her thoughts out to know there was a mass mobilization up the tunnel, that even now they were covering the distance she had set.  
  
“Reinforcements?”  
  
“They’ve emptied out the barracks,” he said. “The last battalion. Even if you make it to the Supreme Leader, you’ll have a hundred blasters to your back.”  
  
“Then let’s take care of them first—“ Rey found herself fighting back trepidation. Her grip on his cowl had tightened. “Between you and me, we can take on all of them, I know it—“  
  
“We probably could…” he said, his eyes briefly wandering away. Too briefly. “But then you risk the Supreme Leader getting away. And unless I’m mistaken, the whole point of this assault is for you to not let him get away.”  
  
Rey’s mind raced, chasing possibilities, contingencies, trying to create a plan that wasn’t the one he was already suggesting.  
  
“No,” Rey said. She glared up at him. “There’s too many of them. Even for you.”  
  
She expected bravado, maybe even bristling, but he simply shrugged.  
  
“True,” he said.  
  
It was that little shrug - the casual movement of his shoulders, that made Rey’s voice break. “I don’t want you to do this.”  
  
He was as gentle as she had ever known he could be. But through the calm of his gaze arose the steel of his will. “Rey—I have done many terrible things. I neither expect nor want forgiveness. This now, is the place where my decisions have led me. And I will not run away from it.”  
  
He turned her face up to look at him. It was an entreaty. “Let me do this for you.”  
  
Rey’s fingers brushed his arm, hanging off the plaits on his wrist. She was aware of the tenuous thread by which the moment hung, how the strands were already unraveling. In the blink of an eye the thread would snap, and the plunge would be deep. She tried to find the words that would make this moment lengthen, but the only thought that formed was how unfair this felt.  
  
“But I just found you,” she said, her vision swimming.  
  
He leaned forward, holding her close.  
  
“You did. And it was good to see you,” he said. “It always is. Especially when it’s not to fight.”  
  
She had been pressed to him like this so many times before, she had a map of the smell and feel, the warmth, of him. Under her cheek was the smooth fabric of his suit, and beneath it was the beat of his heart, steady as a drum. He felt no fear.  
  
“Say it to me again,” he said.  
  
She turned up her chin. “That I love you?”  
  
He smiled. It wasn’t quite happy, but there was satisfaction in it.  
  
“Yes, that,” he exhaled, and years of tension seemed to flow away with it. “Thank you.”  
  
The moment was on them now. Rey could feel it. There was a rumbling in the corridor - the uniform march of hundreds of boots, blasters knocking against armor. She had to go - she knew it. His gaze had gone over her shoulder, towards the passage she had come from, and an edge was coming to his eyes. Still, Rey couldn’t let go. Everything she could have said flashed through her thoughts— _Don’t leave me—Come back_ —things she had once yelled at the sky - promises there was no guarantee he’d be able to keep.  
  
His gaze drifted towards hers. If she were to think that it was for the last time, she would fall apart, and there was miles to go yet.  
  
She forced the tips of her lips upward, through the strain it took to keep her face from crumpling.  
  
“If you come back, you’ll have to say you love me every day for as long as you live,” she said.  
  
His face softened. “If I don’t come back, not being able to do that will be my only regret.”  
  
For a second, the smile she wore was a real one. She stepped away, ignoring the frost in her limbs, taking this look of him and storing it where she kept her brightest memories.  
  
Her eyes were on him until she was at the threshold of the next bend.  
  
“May the Force be with you,” she said.  
  
His face, the tranquility in his eyes, disappeared under the mask. “You too,” he said.  
  
And his back was to her and the red of his lightsaber sliced through the air, and he was stalking back up the hallway.  
  
Rey shut her eyes for a moment. Just for a moment.  
  
And then her own saber came to life in her hand, twin blades shining gold, and she ran into the next corridor, headlong into darkness.  
  
  
There were things waiting for her further down the tunnels, tall, gangly droids in scarlet cloaks that flapped in the dusty air as they attacked with lances tipped with crackling electricity.  
  
Rey was almost thankful for them. She dodged the first, backed into the second, her twin sabers whirling. The top blade found a red-swaddled throat, and the bottom blade, a droid face. She continued down the path over the sound of metal crumbling to the ground.  
  
But as the darkness thickened around her, the only light now coming from her saber, another voice reached out - cold, slipping beneath her skin like worms digging into earth. Rey cringed in revulsion, even as she continued to run.  
  
_‘You’re telling yourself that he’s strong, that he can still survive this…’_  
  
She knew whose voice that was. Angrily, she tried to shut the hatches of her mind down against it. But it was insistent, pouring into her mind like a whisper right at her ear.  
  
_‘He’s tearing into the stormtroopers. Cutting through them like wheat. That is the creature of my design. The weapon I fashioned. Alas, pointed in the wrong direction.’_  
  
Rey ignored it. She would not give it the satisfaction of a response.  
  
_‘Such a promising apprentice. But ultimately pathetic. Like his father, and grandfather.’_  
  
More droids rushed out from the dark, one nearly caught her by the shoulder. She feinted left, struck right—how had Ben stood having this voice in his head, all those years?—the livid beam leaving a scorched trail across metal plating.  
  
_‘You should see him,’_ the voice continued, a tinge of admiration there. _‘One lightsaber, against all that firepower. They're launching grenades now. He's tossing it back at them with the Force.’_  
  
In Rey’s mind, the voice turned into a snarl.  
  
_‘Are you pleased with yourself, scavenger? Undoing the work of decades by wafting your cunt under his nose. That fool—he could have had anyone he desired, but you broke his resolve.’_  
  
Rey came to a fork in the path, cast her mind out, saw that the left route was filled with more of the scarlet-cloaked droids. That was the path she took. The voice continued seeping into her mind, spreading like mist.  
  
_‘He tried to hide it from me. His compassion for you. I allowed it, for a time. If he had succeeded in seducing you to our side, his weakness would have at least served a purpose.’_ The voice grew just a bit colder. _‘The only reason I haven’t destroyed him yet is he still might.’_  
  
Rey left a pile of sparking droid corpses behind her. Briefly, Rey had an impression, a vision, of a single dark figure standing against wave after wave of stark white armor. She saw flashes of red - the burning of the cross-shaped beams, a torrent of blaster fire, blooming splatters on the floor. Some of that blood was his.  
  
Her breath quickened, energy surging through her veins, but it didn’t dull the sudden fear that clamped down around her. It was as though the voice knew this.  
  
_‘He stumbled—he can’t guard his back against them all, and they’re closing in—oh but look, he’s standing up again. How brave he is.’_  
  
Rey wasn’t tired, not yet, but heaviness was settling into her limbs. She had to force herself to keep going. She had to—  
  
_‘Allow me to show you.’_  
  
Rey cried out—it was like a pair of clammy hands had reached into her mind and torn open a window. Through it she saw an ocean of stormtroopers behind a rain of blaster bolts. The crackling lightsaber rose into view, deflecting a new hail of bolts, all but one, which met its mark. Pain seared through her—his—shoulder.  
  
He had lost count of how many times he’d been hit. Blood dripped down behind him. It was only the adrenaline keeping him on his feet, his arms up. They were coming at him from all sides, clambering over the remains of those who had gone before them. Let them come, he thought. Let them all come.  
  
Another bolt sailed towards him from out the corner of his eye - struck his side, burning through skin, and he staggered back. In a ring around him, the stormtroopers prepared to swarm.  
  
But the pain fed him. Beneath the mask was a grin. He threw his left hand back, energy churning from his shoulders to fingers, held in a claw-like grip until he released it in a wave of lightning that spread outwards, striking a dozen stormtroopers at once, felling them.  
  
I can do this—he thought faintly—I might actually do this.  
  
But from behind the lines came a heavy metal clanking. A pair of AT-STs, those great lumbering two-legged walkers, ducked into the chamber, their heavy guns pointed at him. His heart fell.  
  
As he began stepping back, he glanced over his shoulder.  
  
_‘Rey…?’_  
  
_‘Hold on—‘_ she thought, frantically. _‘Just a bit longer—‘_  
  
The window slammed shut.  
  
And again came that voice.  
  
_‘How long do you think he’s going to last out there? You know as well as I that it won’t be for much longer.’_ The voice lowered into a purr. _‘But you can still save him, my dear girl.’_  
  
Rey couldn’t suppress a tremble.  
  
_‘Isn’t that what you want to do? I can see it in your mind. You wish to save him. You can. I give you this option.’_  
  
Rey made a vague gesture, like she were trying to throw off a blanket that had fallen over her face. She tried not to listen, but she couldn’t help it.  
  
_‘Lay down your lightsaber,’_ it said softly, like it were making a perfectly reasonable request. _‘Surrender yourself to me. I need only say the word, and my forces will draw back.’_  
  
Rey stopped cold, her heart pounding, sweat dripping from her face. She was out of breath.

_'He's getting tired too,'_ it said. _'Rey, what are you doing? Why do you hesitate? Don't you love him?'_  
  
There came something like a sigh at the back of her mind. _‘How cruel you are. Every second brings him closer to death. And he will die in pain, I assure you of that.’_  
  
Rey’s lightsaber dropped to her side, still bright in the gloom. She looked over her shoulder, knowing she’d see nothing but the darkness of the tunnel. But it was as though she could see that he’d dropped to his knee, and when he turned up, red filled his vision, a blaster bolt striking the helmet square in the visor—he fell back, cold air touching his face through a smoking hole in the mask’s face—  
  
_‘Give in,’_ the voice said again, more insistently. _‘Do you want him to suffer?’_  
  
The cold permeated her. It would be so easy to just put her saber down. The easiest thing in the world.  
  
But even as Rey considered it, a memory came to her. A warm breeze through a half-opened window. String music played late into the night, and into the unholy hours. Chandrila, in the dark hours before dawn.  
  
They had not slept at all. But after the urgency of their needs had been met (once or twice more), there had still been a sliver of night left between them and whatever the day might bring, and she had lain herself on him, chin resting on his collar, feeling him breathe beneath her.  
  
“If one of us doesn’t make it—“ she began. She wasn’t sure how to finish it.  
  
“It’s a possibility,” he had said.  
  
“If you or I should die—“ Again, that odd pause.  
  
“If you die,” he said. “I will burn this galaxy down and everyone in it.” He had said it with a smile, but his eyes had not left hers, so she had tucked her chin in, pressing her face to his chest.  
  
“If you die,” she mumbled, “I don’t know. I guess I’ll mourn you.”  
  
His fingertips had followed the base of her neck, down to the root of her spine. “The Jedi claimed that there is no death, only the Force.”  
  
“There is death,” Rey had said. “I’ve seen it.”  
  
“The Sith believed that through power, they’d be able to stop death itself.”  
  
“Is that what you believe?”  
  
He had mulled it over. “Maybe they did have that power, but I certainly don’t possess it. And I’ve dealt too much death to think there won’t be some kind of reckoning.”  
  
His hand rested right on her hip. “But if my life were to come to an end, I’d prefer that it be a death worth dying.”  
  
“Even if it hurts?”  
  
“What’s a little more pain?”  
  
“I meant, if it hurts me,” Rey had said, perching herself up to see his face.  
  
He leaned upwards, and she felt his lips against her forehead. “Especially if it should hurt you,” he said, with just the lightest notes of sadness.  
  
She had looked away then, her thoughts in disarray, feeling within her that light devoured shadow, shadow devoured light.  
  
  
Back in the tunnel, Rey found herself looking on ahead, at the last stretch between her and the source of that voice. As she did, a savage fire rose in her chest. She took one step forward. Through the web of the Force, she felt shock—this was not what the voice was expecting.    
  
Another step. Something welled up within Rey - something that felt like typhoon winds, tearing violently through her. But in the center of the storm was stillness.  
  
“He suffers nothing in vain,” Rey said, to the darkness around her. “And neither do I.”  
  
A tremor went through her mind - rage, and something else.  
  
“You are afraid,” Rey said. A small part of her thrilled at this. “You should be.”  
  
She raised her lightsaber again, and summoning all the power she had left, dashed forward with unnatural speed, knowing that her target was near.  
  
From the dark came the scarlet-robed droids, their static-tinged staves whipping towards her. Rey side-stepped, swerved, struck. Arms and heads fell behind her. Nothing was going to make her slow down now.  
  
The voice had disappeared into an incoherent roaring.  
  
“I am going to put an end to this,” Rey said. “For him. For myself.”  
  
As she did she reached out, trying to find Ben wherever he was, unsure he’d even be able to hear. _‘Just a bit longer—’_  
  
It was as though she could hear his heart, the beat now weak, sporadic. Between thuds came long silences that grew longer still.  
  
_‘Ben, please—’_ she had to grasp for his presence in the Force. She listened for that next beat, that next thud, but it came soft as a whisper. The silence that came after threatened to cloud around her.  
  
Rey tore down the last door at the end of the corridor, her eyes blazing, rage and determination seething through her. The ancient figure that awaited would not go down without a fight, but she was ready.  
  
“I’ll make this quick,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters to go WHOOO.
> 
> One of my earliest fantasies of Kylo Ren was of him going out to fight a hundred hundred stormtroopers in a last-ditch bid at redemption. Not gunna lie, I wanna see something like that in the movies.
> 
> Next update on Monday.


	15. The Dark

???????  
??????? ??????  
?????? ??????  
  
  
Kylo Ren snapped out of—what was it? A daydream? A brief lapse into thoughts that dissipated when he tried to reclaim them—to find that his side still ached. His limbs were leaden, the muscles strung out, and he had that lightness of feeling that came from losing a lot of blood. He grunted, the noise muffled behind his mask. It felt like there were embers buried behind his ribs. There had been a fight, hadn’t there? But the particulars escaped him.  
  
He stepped forward. He was in a narrow hallway. Whitewashed walls. A habitation of some sort. He reached out with the Force, trying to determine where he was exactly—but it was like touching white noise, a soft, crumpled buzzing that echoed in a vast empty space.  
  
His guts gave a sickening lurch. Something was wrong—where was he? And why was he alone?  
  
No—not quite alone.  
  
An image came to mind, so clearly it stopped him in his tracks. He had the impression of a hand reaching out to touch his face - a gentle touch that roved around the planes of his cheeks. It gave him a curious feeling, a twisting inside his chest, but he suppressed it immediately. It was _her_.  
  
The scavenger. She was here.  
  
The hallway opened up into a circular room. Dim light filtered down through the painted glass lining the domed ceiling - Kylo saw pictures of moons, starships, planets. At the very peak of the dome was a painted sun, the rays extending outward like tendrils. Beneath the dome was a large, ornate table, and on the table, sitting with one leg up on the ledge, was her.  
  
She looked up as he entered. For some reason, she was smiling. “There you are.”  
  
His hand automatically went to his lightsaber, clipped to his belt. He ignited it as he drew, the torrid hum of it filling the silence of the room. The smile disappeared.  
  
“What is this place?” he demanded. “Why are you here?”  
  
She eased herself down, her eyes darkening.  
  
He braced himself - her own saber hung at her hip, but she didn’t reach for it. Instead, she approached him as though it were the most natural thing in the world.  
  
“You don’t remember this place?” she asked. “You and I spent some time here, a while ago.”  
  
He lifted the blade towards her, and she paused. She showed nothing by way of fear, just a calm determination that made him wonder where it was coming from.  
  
“What’s the last thing you remember?” she asked.  
  
Battle. Pain. Fear. The place fear gave way to strength, when there was absolutely nothing else to lose.  
  
“I was…knocked down. Out in the woods…” Pictures came to mind but he couldn’t make sense of them, couldn’t pull them into a cohesive story.

The woods? No, it had been a tunnel. A vast tunnel. Blaster bolts raining down. Stormtrooper helmets marred with blood. He had spun around, feeling her presence over his shoulder. But—he had been hunting her, hadn’t he? Out in the snow? Something had shrieked, some kind of beast, with many eyes, and sharp tusks. It had attacked him. Then the wind had whipped up, biting cold, and he had left small red beads underfoot as he—as he and the scavenger—had walked together to the habitation—  
  
“There was a storm—“ he murmured. “We’re trapped here until it lifts…”  
  
She nodded slowly. “And…that’s all you remember?” she asked.  
  
“What else is there?” Kylo asked.  
  
Her face dropped. She folded her arms, sighed. “Honestly, Ben, you can be incredibly infuriating sometimes.”  
  
His blade snapped towards her throat, a sudden rage bursting within him.  
  
“Do not say that name.”  
  
“Or what?” she asked. “You’ll kill me?”  
  
Yes, he wanted to say, but something prevented him from it. Would he kill her? It made sense that he would strike, that he would attack—  
  
“Why would you even use that name?” he said, terse beneath the mask.  
  
She suddenly walked right into the line of the ignited saber, uncaring, and the only reason it didn’t slice through her throat was Kylo found himself drawing the blade away as she came closer.  
  
The red beam cut a line between their faces. In the harsh glow, her gaze, like sharpened steel, found his eyes through the visor. “Because you asked me to,” she said.  
  
He drew back, thumb running over the switch in the hilt. The unease he had felt earlier had turned into a rumbling that made the hairs at the back of his neck stand.  
  
_Why?_ He felt he knew the answer, it just kept slipping away, darting to the corner of his eye and off behind him when he swerved to find it.  
  
The scavenger kept her gaze locked on him. “I’d prefer to have this conversation with your face, if you don’t mind.”  
  
_A monster in a mask._ That’s what she had called him before, hadn’t she? He reached up, disengaged the latches, and pulled the helmet off. Her eyes widened, her mouth forming an 'oh'.  
  
“What?” he asked, suddenly self-conscious.  
  
“The scar—“ her voice dropped. “The scar isn’t there.”  
  
Kylo reached up to his face, found nothing but untouched skin. A scar…? Yes, she had given him a scar, in a flash of searing blue light—  
  
She stepped towards him, mystified. “You look exactly as you did the first time I saw you. Are you doing this? Or am I?”  
  
She reached out, and he could have turned away, could have stepped back, but he already knew before her skin touched his that there were callouses on the pads of her fingertips, that her touch was gentle, belying the strength behind it—that she would trace lines around his jaw, the angle of his nose, towards his lips. He knew it would feel good when the flat of her palm touched his cheek, when her knuckles grazed his chin.  
  
And he knew that it was just a prelude, really, because what she meant to do was draw him down towards her, so that when she went up on her tiptoes, she’d be able to kiss him.  
  
She was drifting towards him now, and his nerves seemed to burn— _was she really—but why would she?_ —and when he breathed he could smell the salt on her skin, and the scent nudged him to the edge of a precipice beyond which was a vastness of wanting that he realized with a swooping sensation he recognized. Even if now it froze him stock-still.  
  
Her kiss was warmer than he would have thought, the press of her lips slow, as though she were just testing the waters. A surge went through him, a heat he could feel in his chest, an ache in his crotch. He knew this feeling. He knew this feeling intimately.  
  
Just as he knew that her tongue would slide into his mouth, and his hands, as though released from shackles, would dig into her back, would crush her to him, and he would need this kiss, the taste of her, the small muffled noise she made when his tongue slid against hers, he needed to catch every little quiver of her lips, and he was suddenly lifting her up off her feet, her arms wound around his neck, and he was bringing her to the table.  
  
All thought had fled. The many pains he had awoken to disappeared as though they were never there. In this moment, there was only movement, ingrained in him so deeply all he had to do was lean into them. Clothing was tugged aside, his fingers finding clasps, belts, folds, with well-practiced precision, even as his breathing tightened, heat climbing up his chest.  
  
_What am I doing_ , he had time to wonder, before desire took over, and he couldn’t have stopped himself if he wanted to, and he did not want to stop.  
  
Beneath him, she said nothing, watching with a look half of want, half of amusement. Her legs were clamping down around his hips, as his hands slid up her shins—he knew that she’d tense up when his fingers stroked the space beneath the joint of her knee, when his thumb found that little spot right at the edge of her hip that tickled her. Secret places he knew the way to.  
  
He knew she’d be wet, warmth trickling from between her thighs, knew she’d grit her teeth the moment he buried his dick into the tightness of her. Noise welled up from his throat as he started fucking her, a series of guttural exhalations, growing strained, louder, the deeper he pushed into her, rising up in his throat as he went hard, abandoning himself to sheer base motion.  
  
Somehow, her hands had found his, she was wrapping their fingers together. She brought her arms up over her head on the table, his hands arrested in hers, so he found himself bent down above her, breathing into her face.  
  
They were close to coming now. She was squeezing his hands, painfully. He squeezed back.  
  
“Rey—“ he whispered, through the grip of his throat. _Rey._ Beneath him. Sometimes on her back, sometimes on her belly. Or on top of him. To his side. In bed, or on the floor. Against walls of stone or wood or glass. Tangled together, breathing, whispering, murmuring, crying out.  
  
Peaking, as they did now, brief and bright.  
  
“Rey—“ he exhaled one final time, her own sigh mixing with his. “My Rey?”  
  
The smile returned to her lips, along with the softening of her features that always followed when she came. She lifted her head off the table and pecked him near the mouth.  
  
“Hi, Ben.”  
  
  
He lay beside her on the table, the painted sun above casting cold light on their faces. The sweat on her temples seemed real enough. As did the tiredness that had settled over him. But now, the truth of his situation began to dawn.  
  
“Are we dead?” he asked her.  
  
She turned on her side to look at him, and he saw half a dozen emotions crisscrossing her face before she said, “I’m not.”  
  
She sat up, looking as though she only now remembered how weary she was.  
  
“Snoke fell by my hand. And then I made my way back up the tunnel. I wasn’t sure if you were—I called to you in the Force, you weren’t answering. I told myself—“  
  
— _it may be easier not to hope_ —  
  
Kylo—Ben—felt an icy stab in his chest.  
  
“And then I saw your work,” she said. A brief smile. “You took down quite a lot of them. The remains of those chicken walkers were still smoking. Some of the stormtroopers were trying to crawl away. The others had fled.”  
  
A pause, like she were trying to steel herself.  
  
“I found your mask on the ground. There was a hole in it, like you were struck by a blaster bolt right in the face. And then the Resistance were coming down the tunnels, and I—I found you.”  
  
The words caught in her throat. She clutched her knees.  
  
“You still had the saber in your hand. But you weren't moving. You were—“  
  
_Dead._  
  
The suddenness of her tears surprised him. She bit down on her thumb, trying to keep from sobbing, but the whole of her trembled with the effort.  
  
He pulled himself up beside her, arms winding around her shoulders, as her face began to crumple.  
  
“Rey—“ he began, one hand in her hair, pressing her close to him. “I’m not worth this sadness—“  
  
“Shut up,” she hissed, but the sting was lost over a wet sniff. “You don’t get to tell me what I feel about you.”  
  
She took his hand and cradled it between hers.  
  
“I wasn’t surprised,” she said. But he knew, as though he could see it unfolding before him, that the strength that had sustained her throughout her journey through the tunnels had disappeared all at once. She had fallen slack as a sail bereft of wind, beside his own still form.  
  
“I reached out to you—as I always have—with the Force.”  
  
Her fingers slipped around his once again.  
  
“It was just habit, I guess. I needed to convince myself you were truly gone. It was the only way I’d believe you were. I expected nothingness. The nothingness of a stone or a piece of wreckage. But there was…something.”  
  
She looked up at him, her eyes and nose red.  
  
“A spark,” she said. “Just the smallest spark. I didn’t think, I just threw myself into it.”  
  
In his mind’s eye, he saw Rey kneeling beside him, even as her allies began to bluster around to clear the tunnels. They knew better than to disturb her as she lay his head on her lap, her arms around his shoulders, her eyes drifting shut. And she had leaped into the void, arm outstretched, for the twinkle of a distant star.  
  
“That’s how I came here,” she said.  
  
Ben looked around, at the room, at the painted glass in the dome. The longer he looked, the more he saw that there was a strange aged quality to the room, like an old holopic that’s begun losing color and smearing at the edges. It was easy to imagine that the room was fading away, and that when it did, he would as well.  
  
“I think this was probably the last thing I was thinking of before I passed out,” Ben said, his arm still around Rey’s shoulders.   
  
She leaned the side of her head against him. “I don’t know how long I can stay here. It’s taken quite a lot of my power to even get this far.”  
  
He brushed his fingers through her hair, tucking back a stubborn lock behind her ear. “It’s more than I could have asked, for you to come all this way to say good-bye.”  
  
“I didn’t come to say good-bye,” she said, turning back up on her chin again. “I came here to bring you back with me.”  
  
He did not hide his incredulity. Somewhere, he was on the floor, broken to pieces, staining her garments with his blood. Here, she straightened up, all the better to look him in the eye.  
  
“I think I can,” she said. “All you have to do is walk back out the door with me.”  
  
The wooden door stood a short corridor off to the side, light streaming in from the little keyhole. Ben wasn’t sure if it had always been there and he hadn’t noticed, or if it only appeared because Rey needed it to.  
  
He looked at her, resting his chin on his knuckles. When he was really looking, he could sense an intensity to her presence. It’s like she was anchored in the room through strings of livid power, a web through which Ben could feel the depth of her passions, her want. It was the kind of power the Dark Side granted, but with none of the scouring that usually came with it. Instead, through the mesh of Darkness, he could perceive her stillness, her Light, woven into the tapestry. He’d never seen anything like it, and could have just sat there for hours studying the paradox.  
  
“Do you realize you’re probably committing some form of Force heresy?” he asked, mildly.  
  
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe? I honestly didn’t think this through.”  
  
She raised an eyebrow at the look he gave her. “What?” she asked. “You’re smiling.”  
  
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just proud of you.”  
  
She looked away, embarrassed, and somehow that was even more endearing.  
  
But then her eyes fell to the table.  
  
“Do you actually want to come back?” she asked. There was a note of hesitation in her voice. “I’m here because I’m not done with you yet.”  
  
Her lips straightened out. “But I don’t know what awaits you—us, back out there. To most everyone, you’ll still be Kylo Ren. It won’t be easy.”  
  
Ben took another glance around the room. It would be easier to stay. It would even be peaceful. But he looked at her face again, and it was not a difficult decision to make.  
  
“You came back for me,” he said, leaning towards her, all the better to watch the way her eyes lit up. “I will come back for you.”  
  
  
  
Out the door, between life and death, the wind howled. It was like a storm, but Ben couldn’t tell if it was snow, or sand, or something else. All he could see was a wild, buffeting whiteness that stretched out as far as he could see. Rey walked ahead, her fingers strong around his.  
  
He looked back over his shoulder to see the door, and the silhouette of the habitation, blurring into the jarring whiteness. It occurred to him that he’d left his mask somewhere in that house. Although it wasn’t really his mask, and it wasn’t really a house. He turned away, focusing on moving forward.  
  
The wind seemed to pick up, and fear arose within him. But Rey continued to walk ahead. He wondered if this was familiar to her, from her days back in Jakku. But the thought slid off to the side when he realized that they were not the only figures out under the storm.  
  
“ _Rey_ —“ a voice. A man’s.  
  
He seemed to appear out of the whiteness, a gray-bearded man with a face that Ben suspected was not as old as it seemed, that it had been hardship that etched the lines on his forehead, and the corner of his mouth.  
  
“ _Is this truly the wisest course of action?_ ” he asked. As Rey turned to the vision, his form seemed to become clearer. He was dressed in Jedi robes.  
  
“I don’t know,” Rey said, her voice barely audible over the wind. “I guess I’ll find out.”  
  
“ _Unprecedented, this is,_ ” said another voice off to Rey’s side. This one came from a short, hunched figure, fine hairs across his otherwise bald head, and long, pointy ears. A pair of claws rested on the head of a stunted walking cane.  
  
“ _The balance of the Force, you are testing. Much you are risking in bringing this one—_ ” a beady gaze turned to Ben. “ _Back with you_.”  
  
“I know, that’s all you kept telling me on the way here,” Rey said, exasperation in her voice. “I haven’t changed my mind.”  
  
A third voice came from right behind Ben. “ _Oh, let them go.”_  
  
Ben turned to find another Jedi, just as tall as he was, with hair that fell softly past his ears, and a prominent scar by his right eye. He’d raised a gloved hand to his lips, trying to hide a grin.  
  
“ _They’re in love,_ ” the Jedi said.  
  
The other two visions made chiding noises, but they receded into the whiteness.  
  
Rey looked over her shoulder at the Jedi, a smile flashing. “Thanks for that.”  
  
“ _Not a problem._ ”  
  
Ben watched the Jedi even as Rey began pulling him away, trying to determine why the man seemed so painfully familiar. There was something in the way he stood, like he could tear through anything with a lightsaber at the bat of an eyelash, and something about the set of his brows, that lent his face a severity even when he smiled. He noticed Ben staring, and the look he returned it with pierced deep.  
  
Ben’s lips moved on their own accord, his voice drowned out by the wind. “Grandfather…?”  
  
The Jedi’s grin widened, like this was a wonderful joke they were both in on. As his form began to fade into the white, he nodded his head, as though in approval, and farewell.  
  
Ben, breathless, tried to call out to Rey, but the wind was in his ears, it seemed to blow right through his skin. The whiteness grew starker around his eyes, so that even she seemed to be fading into it. But her grip in his remained strong. He could feel it even as white fell on all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go ughghhh I'm so excited to get there :D.
> 
> Also I have never looked so intensely at photos of Hayden Christensen :D. Hahahaaa.
> 
> Now, a confession. I've never actually fully read any other Reylo fanfiction (I've been obsessed with keeping my personal version of the characters pristine while getting this trilogy down, so I'd kept away from other prose works. I -have- read some drabbles, webcomics, a ton of metas and character analyses. A metric shit-ton of fanart). When I've wrapped this story up, I think I'll go jump off the deep end :D. Already got a few fanfics lined up, but if anyone's got any recommendations for me, just leave them in the comments :).
> 
> Last update on Friday.


	16. The Gray

He was mired in deep night, but stray noises, images, drifted through like fireflies. Faces, ashen with disbelief— _kriff, the bastard’s alive_. The low roar of an engine breaking atmosphere. Rey, her shoulders and arms swaddled in bandages, but her gaze hard—he had tried to reach out to her, and she, to him, but a pane of curved glass separated the palms of their hands. _Him?_ someone had asked her. _Him,_ she had responded. The feeling of floating underwater. More chatter— _There’s talk that he’ll be executed_ —And he had drifted into the dark once more.  
  
And then he remembered himself, and his eyes opened.  
  
Ben was drifting in a bacta tank, breathing through an apparatus strapped around his head. Past the glass of the tank were the blinking lights of the control board, and the reader that told him it was currently midway through the evening cycle. A nurse walked past.  
  
The disorientation only lasted a moment. He gathered himself, fell into the Force (that felt good, _now_ he was awake), sensed he was in some kind of vast starship out in space, some Resistance capital ship. Rey was somewhere here, there was no mistaking the chime of her presence. But there were people out in the hallways, going up and down the decks, which meant he had to proceed as delicately as possible.  
  
His corner of the medical bay was empty at the moment, save for that one nurse. He waited until she had walked back out before making a move.  
  
He lifted a hand through the viscous press of the bacta, found with his mind the lever that controlled the tank. The lever switched downward, seemingly on its own accord.  
  
Ben was no stranger to the slosh of bacta draining away, or the hum of the cylinder receding so he could rip off the apparatus. He knew the gummy feeling that came with rediscovering how to put weight on your legs, that brief wave of amazement of finding, upon flexing your arms, your fingers, that the worst of the damage was gone. He’d figured he’d find towels and robes in the locker that stood nearby. But then something clattered to the floor behind him and he looked around to find that the nurse had returned.  
  
She had dropped her datapad and thrown her hands upwards, like she’d just encountered a knife-wielding mugger in a dark alley.  
  
“Please don’t kill me,” she whispered, fear-sweat dripping from her temples.  
  
There was about a dozen things he could have done at that moment, most of which involved leaving the nurse’s Force-choked body on the floor. Ben slowly held up a hand, found that he was so out of practice speaking in a soft, reasonable tone, that the statement “I’m not going to hurt you” came off as a threat.  
  
The woman sniffled. “I have children,” she said.  
  
He was about to try again when the door behind the nurse slid open and Rey rushed in.  
  
She came to a sudden halt at the sight of him with the robe halfway up his shoulders, bacta still dripping from his hair.  
  
“Oh—“ she grinned. “You’re awake.” Her eyes alighted on his face. “And the scar’s back. A few new ones too.”  
  
“I could always pop back into the tank ’til they’re all gone,” he said.  
  
“They’re not that bad.”  
  
“And you were just passing by to watch me float, were you?”  
  
“I’ve been doing that the last few days, but on this occasion I was going to bust you out.”  
  
“How convenient, I was just about to go looking for you.”  
  
The nurse, hands still in the air, turned from Rey, to Ben, her confusion threatening to overwhelm her.  
  
As though she just realized they weren’t alone, Rey turned to the nurse and waved her hand in front of the woman. “You will forget you saw us. And you will go to the dispenser and get a caff.”  
  
As the woman, eyes glazed, exited the room, Ben found himself alone with Rey with the inexplicable feeling that it was for first time in his entire life. It was a gossamer bubble of a moment that lasted until Rey burst it.  
  
“Welcome back,” she said.  
  
“Good to be back,” he said. And then after a moment of consideration, added, “Sweetheart.”  
  
  
The halls were indeed full of people. Between dodging around corners, slipping under the lenses of security cameras (in a thin robe, no less, Ben thought, not one of his more dignified moments), they exchanged whispers.  
  
“So they want to execute me?”  
  
“It’s a complicated matter,” Rey said, leading him down a brightly-lit hallway. “There are still splinters of the First Order left, some of the senators of the New Republic think that killing you will send a strong message.”  
  
“If they were going to kill me, why bother having me healed?”  
  
“Because this is General Organa’s flagship.”  
  
That sent a churn through his guts.  
  
“She’s here?”  
  
Rey looked at him over her shoulder. “Who do you think told me that the guard rotation was such that if I wanted to bust you out, I’d have to go into the medical bay at the exact time I did?”  
  
“She knows,” Rey said. “Finn and Poe know. Master Luke knows. Everyone knows.”  
  
“Your friends—“  
  
“—were not too happy,” a look of guilt passed over her. “But I told them about Bastatha. And it helps that your stunt back in Jakku actually made a big difference in that battle.”  
  
They sidestepped a group of laughing pilots.  
  
“When the alarm goes off—which it will, shortly—they’ll be suggesting to the guards that you were last seen sneaking into a transport in the port side landing bay.”  
  
“Where are we actually going?”  
  
“The starboard side landing bay.”  
  
The starboard side landing bay was largely bereft of people, but they continued dodging behind stacks of crates, parked shuttles, roving astromechs, making one last dash to the backmost corner, where Ben found that he was running up the gangplank of the Millennium Falcon.  
  
The smell of it assaulted him - old metal and fuel, engine grease, the vague whiff of Wookie. That crack in the wall was still there, the loose floor slat was still loose.  
  
When Rey settled into the pilot seat, Ben saw that the console at least, had changed - it was still a ramshackle collection of knobs and levers, held together by sticky tape and prayer ( _Dad, why is your ship so garbage_ , he once asked Han Solo. Han had turned to him with the look of a man who was beyond such chiding, saying, _I have no idea what you’re talking about, boy_ ), but it had now reached levels of chaos he had previously thought unimaginable.  
  
Ben settled into the co-pilot’s seat, trying to settle the torrent that geysered up within him.  
  
As they eased their way out of the landing bay, a voice crackled on the speakers.  
  
_“Millennium Falcon, this is Control. Master Rey, do you copy?”_  
  
Rey’s eyes darted towards Ben, and he realized this was the point where the plan threatened to completely unravel.  
  
“Yes,” Rey said, her voice as controlled as possible. “This is an authorized flight, Control. Jedi business.”  
  
_“Right.”_ There was a pause at the other end. _“The prisoner Kylo Ren has disappeared from the infirmary, we’ve got people looking for him in the port bay, but we’re checking all outbound flights as well. Do you know anything about this?”_  
  
Her eyes directly on him, Rey leaned over the mic and said, “Nope.”  
  
Another pause. A sigh from the other end. _“Our scanners are picking up two life forms in your ship. Who are you with?”_  
  
“Um—“ Rey made a gesture that was so unconvincing Ben had to wonder how she’d managed to keep their affair a secret for so long. “Not Kylo Ren.”  
  
The voice came back on, more sternly. _“Master Rey, I’m going to have to ask you to—“_  
  
Rey threw herself at the lever that engaged the thrusters.  
  
The Falcon kicked back so hard, Ben was pushed back into his seat. The landing pads fell away beneath them, the bright blue of the gate’s force field slipping over the ship, as they suddenly found themselves facing the darkness of space.  
  
“Jump to hyperspace,” she hissed, turning to him. “Jump to hyperspace now.”  
  
His voice was rising. “Where are we even going?”  
  
“I don’t know—just pick a place!”  
  
Ben’s hands automatically ran over the console, finding that he still knew where to input the coordinates (an empty expanse in the Outer Rim, an old smuggler’s hideaway, drilled into his brain by Chewie, all those years ago). When the computer gave a sad little hum, he knew he had to smack it in the side to make it accept them. As the lights signalling the warp drive was heating up came on, the voice from the loudspeaker came again.  
  
_“—kriffing hell, Master Rey, I don’t want to shoot at a war hero—“_  
  
“So don’t!” Rey’s hand went up to the hyperdrive switch in the ceiling panel. “Look, I will explain myself later, I promise.”  
  
She pulled the lever, the ship shuddered, and the white pinpricks of stars out the viewport stretched into lines that streaked out far behind them.  
  
  
Rey leaned forward against the dashboard, watching the tunnel of hyperspace unfold. She began to snicker. She couldn’t help it. They were in such deep trouble, it wasn’t funny, not at all, yet she threw her head back, and the chuckling gave way to laughter, and her stomach was starting to hurt, but she couldn’t stop. A noise next to her gave her pause, and she knew what it was before she turned towards Ben, but she had never heard him laughing before.  
  
He had fallen back in his seat, one hand over his face, but through the splay of his fingers she could see the split of his lips, the glint of his teeth, the whole of him shuddering with deep, gasping breaths. He stopped when he noticed her staring, but the smile remained, the sheen in his eyes.  
  
“What,” he asked, “Are you going to explain to them exactly?”

She turned her seat towards him. “That it’s better to keep you alive.”  
  
He leaned his chin on the back of his knuckles. “And how will you convince them of that?”  
  
“You’re a warrior with a connection to the Force,” she said. “There’s more you can do for the galaxy alive than dead.”  
  
“I see,” he said. “I assumed you were simply going to bank on your great affection for me.”  
  
“If only that were enough,” Rey said, eyebrow raised.  
  
“Does what they want really matter?” For a moment, the old swagger returned, the kind best demonstrated from behind a mask. “I’m done serving the First Order. But I don’t care to serve the New Republic.”  
  
“I didn’t say you’d have to work for the New Republic.”  
  
“So what are you saying?”  
  
Rey gave him a look. And he understood.  
  
“I told you before,” he said, opening his palms out towards her. “I can never return to being a Jedi.”  
  
“I agree,” Rey said. “But I’m no Jedi either. Those ghosts out in the white wastes made that pretty clear.”  
  
She turned to him. “And your behavior of late would have made the Sith disown you, if you were ever one of them.”

He smirked at that.  
  
“We’re something else,” she said. “Something similar. I suspect Master Luke always knew about us, but that he allowed it, because he figured that it would lead to—this. I want to figure out what _this_ is. And I want you to help me.”  
  
He watched her quietly. “I was hoping you’d say ‘let’s just take the Falcon and run. Let’s go wherever we want, do whatever we want.”  
  
“Do you really believe we could do that?” she asked. It was tempting. Shorn of responsibility, out in the endless expanse of worlds, there was nothing the two of them couldn’t do. With the Falcon, there was nowhere they couldn’t go.  
  
But he leaned back, lips straightening.  
  
“No. You have obligations.” His look momentarily darkened. “And I have to become less unforgivable.”  
  
“It's a nice dream, even if it remains a dream."  
  
“Then I have one condition,” he said.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I will not be parted from you again,” he crossed his arms. “We’ve had enough of seeing each other in small bits between long periods of time, don’t you think?”  
  
She did think that. Rey felt her stomach do a little flip, the seeds of an idea taking root.  
  
“I may have a way of ensuring that.”  
  
He looked at her questioningly, but she had leaned to the side of the pilot’s seat, bringing out her rucksack.  
  
She reached inside and pulled out a familiar object, which she sent towards him with the Force. The pyramid-shaped device landed in his hand.  
  
“Bastila’s holocron,” he said. “I thought I left this at the bastion—“  
  
“Yeah, the troops found it,” Rey said. “They gave it to me ‘because it looked like a Force thingy’. You’ve probably figured it out too, but it’ll only open when you’re drawing from the in-between of Dark and Light.”  
  
She rose from her seat and disappeared into her cabin, finding what she was looking for in the small wooden box she kept beneath her bunk, the one that contained a rip of old black ribbon and the damaged remains of a First Order datapad.  
  
“Remember this?” she asked, returning to the cockpit.  
  
“Revan’s holocron,” he said. “We found these together.”  
  
It came easily to Rey to open the holocron now. The edges of the cube spun and the top part unfolded like a noble’s jewelry box.  
  
“I’ve been learning from this,” Rey said, illuminated from underneath by the light that pulsed from beneath the holocron’s filigree. “Do you know what a Force Bond is?”  
  
He ran his thumb against the edges of the pyramid, looking at her thoughtfully. “The enmeshing in the Force between two adepts. Usually a master and apprentice. That they have a door between their minds even with the distance of the galaxy between them.”  
  
“Well, yes,” Rey said. “But the bond between Revan and Bastila ran deeper. In a way, it married them. I suspect you and I already sort of have one,” she shrugged, “I can dip into your mind way too easily. But we can strengthen it.”  
  
“So,” A puckish curve appeared at the tip of his lips, the effect of it just a bit unnerving. “You want to marry me.”  
  
Rey realized what she had just said and the heat flared up on her cheeks so quickly she thought her nose would gush blood.  
  
“Wait—“ her voice grew pitchy. “Wait, that’s not what I meant—I said ‘in a way it married them’, not like actually—“  
  
“Ah,” he touched a finger to his chin. “Pity.”  
  
She was aware of how red she had gotten. “What I meant was if we’re going to explore the Force together, we might as well be…synchronised…”  
  
“Of course,” he said.  
  
She fumbled for a response, juggled the words, blustered, and dropped them. “You are making fun of me.”  
  
He leaned towards her. “It was worth getting through this entire war, dying and coming back, just to see this look on your face.”  
  
  
The Millennium Falcon burst back out into real space amid the blossoming of vast clouds of nebula, containing colors that belonged to sunsets and deep oceans. But in the cockpit, the brightest lights came from the two opened holocrons, levitating on either side of Rey and Ben, spilling a thrumming through the Force that Rey could almost feel on her skin.  
  
They were meant to be a guide, but the way their light drifted over Ben’s face, at the seriousness that had returned there, made the tips of her fingers go cold, even as heat grew in her chest. There is no reason to be nervous, she told herself. No reason at all.  
  
But then he got down on one knee in front of her, and the hot-cold rushed all the way up to her head.  
  
“All the Knights bend the knee when they enter an accord,” he said. A bit of nervousness there too. “It just seems fitting.”  
  
Rey chuckled, heart pounding in her ears, but she knelt down as well, so that she was at the level of his eyes. “Then I guess I have to kneel too,” she said, “I’m about to enter into the same accord.”  
  
A softness entered his features, and Rey had the notion of being beheld, in her entirety.  
  
She lifted up her right hand, and he lifted up his left, their palms just a hair’s breadth apart. Rey closed her eyes, the lights from the holocrons tinting the darkness behind her eyelids, and she plunged into the current of the Force.  
  
The two holocrons reverberated and it was as though Rey found herself somewhere else - somewhere she could see the Light and Dark Sides like streams, weaving around her, one a gentle, continuous flow, the other a pitching current. Both carried the beat of the heart of the Force in them.  
  
Rey wasn’t surprised to find him there, with her, at the place where the streams battled, where passion flattened into serenity, and stillness broke into emotion. As she did back in the tunnels under Jakku, Rey did not give much though to what she had to do, she just opened her mind, reached out to him—  
  
Ben was familiar with this place. It had been the seat of his strength for so long, in the tug between the Light and the Dark, where the pain of standing between their push and pull had given rise to his power. But now she was here as well, and something curious was happening. The currents were weaving around her, meeting, intertwining. He reached out to her—  
  
On the floor of the Millennium Falcon, their fingertips touched—  
  
—while deep in the Force, the streams calmed, ebbing out, and it was as though they found themselves on a firmament where Dark and Light were indistinguishable, an outcropping of rock over placid waters.  
  
And in that place, Rey realized she could see him - Ben Solo, Kylo Ren, the hunch and coil of emotions not even the mask could hide, and Ben could see her - scavenger, padawan, the iron clutch of her will beneath the brightness of her gaze. Pain on a high walkway, red lightsaber in hand. Loneliness, etching another line on a metal sheet. The knit of her brow, the movement of his lips, past the cross of lightsabers, one red, one blue, a scar left on his face as he lay in the snow, and the memory of him burning in her thoughts, as she took one last look over her shoulder.  
  
That had been when the door had opened, by just a peek.  
  
Now it was thrown wide, and it was as though they had awakened to find they were looking right into each other’s eyes, and there was joy there, and relief, and not a small amount of wanting.  
  
  
It was a small noise - a gentle exhalation of breath - that made Ben open his eyes. Their hands had wound around each other. She didn’t need to speak, but he could feel the warmth that grew within her spread inside him as well. The need for touch. He returned her smile, finding the barbedness of her craving charming. But he would not touch her yet.  
  
_Why not?_ Her thoughts plunked easily in his mind.  
  
He sat back on the floor, leaning his chin on the base of his palm.  
  
_Patience._  
  
_What the hell do you mean patience—_  
  
And he still wasn’t touching her, but she suddenly tumbled back on her haunches with a gasp. It was touch that Rey could feel, like sinuous fingers had crept up the length of her spine, to the back of her neck.  
  
_This is now a possibility_ , Ben’s thoughts drifted into her mind, and the same finger strokes were making their way up her knees, just on his thought and the slightest push of his will through the doorway of their minds. _And it won’t matter how far we may actually be, as long as you keep the door open…_  
  
Rey grit her teeth. The sensation that pervaded her was of fingers drifting all across her form, feather-light caresses that sank past the layers of her clothing, finding the underside of her breasts, the crease of her thighs, the corner of her jaw. And he just sat there, watching her, but his mind was going to all sorts of places.  
  
She tried to ignore the way the invisible fingers had developed a grip, simultaneously around her breasts and her hips, how a single niggling point of pressure had found its way to the mound of her cunt ( _don’t ignore it_ , he whispered, without moving his lips), and the rush of heat and moisture it created traveling along the narrow line of her clit. She was breathing through her teeth, but she fixed him with a look.  
  
_The door opens both ways,_ she thought, and that smile of his edged out, the muscles of his neck tightening. He had the sensation that she had crept forward and opened her mouth around his erection, although she remained right where she was. His nails scuttered at the floorboards, as he had the very distinct feeling of a tongue painting the throbbing vein, of pursed lips around the head, leaving a kiss.  
  
The sound of her actual voice surprised him.  
  
“We can either keep doing it like this, or we can go to my bunk and I can suck your dick for real,” she said.  
  
His eyes drifted half-shut. “Both,” he said.  
  
  
They had known one another’s bodies well enough, as they might have known well-trod paths, or frequently sighted mountains, but with the doorway open it was like the ground giving way, into hitherto unknown depths.  
  
She was on his lap, her back to him, and he was inside her, she could feel the heat of him pushed deep into the walls of her cunt, but at the same time she tasted directly of his own desire for her, there was an astringency to it that made her shudder, and when she shuddered it was as though the tingle down her back slipped down his as well.  
  
When she leaned backwards against him, he caught a whiff of her hair, knew at the same moment she thought it that she loved having his nose buried in her shoulder, and what she wanted was for him to take her nipple between his fingers, to roll it between his thumb and forefinger, and he could feel the spokes on which her delight rode, could feel himself carried along with it, and his slow release of a sigh against the tightening press of her around his dick, raised the hairs at the back of her neck.  
  
She was saying his name through the tautness of her sighs, letting the syllable drift into every corner of the cabin, but in his mind, she whispered, _I’m thinking, we don’t have to get back to them right away—_  
  
His tongue was following a bead of sweat that had slipped down between her shoulder blades, but he responded, _Another day or two won’t kill them—_  
  
_Or, like a week._  
  
_Maybe two weeks._  
  
She shifted so that they faced one another, his arms around her back, her elbows on his shoulders.  
  
_I’ve never gone to Mustafar,_ she thought.  
  
_I’ll take you there,_ he thought back. _And to Ilum. To see the kyber caves._  
  
_And I heard that Ryloth is pretty this time of season…_  
  
And the conversation continued even when he pulled her towards him so he could press his mouth to hers, and through the kiss, and the pictures of worlds they would visit, and the feel of one another held close, was the certainty that neither of them would ever be alone again.  
  
Out among the stars, the Falcon continued to drift, but since the moons and the suns were distant flares out in the darkness of the void, it was as though the night never ended.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't realize at the time I started writing this fic that it would end happily.
> 
> Early on, it was a very real possibility that either Rey would fall to the Dark Side, or that Kylo would die in a blaze of glory. What made the difference was that I realized, back in January, at around 4 in the morning when I couldn't sleep, that at a certain point, those two would have to fess up to their faces that they loved each other. And once that became apparent, it became increasingly unlikely that Kylo would let Rey sacrifice a significant aspect of herself to go Dark Side, and it was further unlikely that Rey would allow Kylo to die :D. 
> 
> I'm a bit relieved the story is done (the writing schedule had been pretty crazy :D ). I'll still write more Star Wars (there's a Ransolm Casterfo meets 23-year-old Ben Solo story I've been mulling over. And I still wanna write that Dark Rey ending). But no more multi-chapter extravaganzas for a while. Maybe after Last Jedi comes out :).
> 
> All that's left now is to thank each and every one of you who read the story, specially those who came in waaaaay back in Behind the Storm. If you've stuck it out all the way here, you are awesome. When I say I appreciate the reads and the comments (and the fic recommendations :D), I really do mean it. You guys make the effort worth it :). And if these stories have managed to give you a few minutes of amusement in your everyday life, I am glad.
> 
> Now this trilogy began with me drunk, so by God it will end the same way. Have a great day :D.


End file.
